


Taproot

by etherati



Series: Wellspring and Everything After [2]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: (because it's fucking castlevania idk what to tell you), Canon-Typical Violence, Earn Your Happy Ending, F/F, F/M, Familiar Faces, Family, Found Family, M/M, Multi, New Faces, OT3, Serious Injuries, Threesome - F/M/M, because the Speakers are lovely, big mistakes, church drama, faces no one expected to see, family mysteries, let's get Sypha an actual backstory for christmas, lots of Speaker stuff, more sex with feels, old crimes, or Solstice, vampire politics bullshit, whatever, winter is here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2020-09-24 04:55:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 87,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20352739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: Taproot (n): the oldest, most central root; the anchor from which all else arises.Every family has its history, its roots, diving down into the shadowy, secretive earth—and there is no such thing as a bloodless inheritance.[Sequel to Wellspring: in which things happen, new faces appear, and our heroes learn more about themselves than they might have wanted.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go! Sequel time!
> 
> I do recommend reading Wellspring first; there's a lot here that won't make sense otherwise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go! Sequel time!
> 
> I do recommend reading Wellspring first; there's a lot here that won't make sense otherwise.

*

Sunrise over the Black Sea—golden light spilling into the water like its own sort of glowing, glittering liquid, diffusing through the brine and illuminating it in hues of orange and amber and violet-pink—is one of the most beautiful sights the natural world has to offer. There are other striking sunrises to be had, and other bodies of water prone to making a person feel overwhelmingly _small_, but nowhere else do the two combine into such a spectacle, delighting the eyes even as it harrows the soul.

At least, nowhere else that Sypha has been, and she has been a lot of places.

She twists the end of her walking stick into the damp sand and gravel. This means that she’s close; she can tell by the particular minerally smell of the salt and the angle of the light that she’s still a bit north of Enisala, but not by very far. There’s no shame in having arrived at the sea slightly off from her target. The only truly accurate navigation is by the stars, and the lingering presence of the night creatures and the winter’s bitter chill have had her travelling mostly with the sun.

Overhead, the keening cries of shorebirds as they dip and weave, coming in low to gather at the waterline, to pick over the tide pools and sandbars. The breakers beat the rocky shore, relentless. There’s a stark beauty to the place, to the way life struggles forward despite its days being filled only with further struggle. Tenacity. Tenacity, she understands, and all the spoils it brings.

This would be a lovely place to bring Adrian and Trevor to, she thinks; let them see this dawn, let the three of them roughhouse in the waves and drink sweet fruit wine in the sun and make love in the cool, damp sand once twilight settles in, all softness and blue-black shadows and the murmur of the tide. When the weather is warmer. When the sea is greener than it is grey, and the wind coming off of it doesn’t threaten to peel the skin from her face and hands. When they feel safe, leaving the castle unguarded for a while.

That time is, definitively, not yet now. But she’s working on it. She’s still not gotten used to travelling alone, honestly hopes she won’t ever have to, but sometimes, needs must, and that’s the entire point of this, of having to be away from them for so long.

She misses them—misses her family, too, but that’s an old ache that she’s grown accustomed to. Missing Adrian and Trevor is a different kind of hurt, sharp and fresh, made worse by knowing how badly they’re missing her in return. When she was growing up, travelling constantly on journeys measured in seasons, a month had felt like nothing. Now, it feels like an eternity.

There’s no snow and ice out here, this close to the water; there never is, in her experience, until you end up truly far north. The sand is wet and the stone crushed into it grinds under her staff. It’s a blunt, thick thing, and there’s no way to get any detail and anyway, she’s no artist.

She still leaves a chunky, lopsided heart in the sand, as if marking the spot to return to later—as if the waves won’t wash it away mere hours after she’s left this place.

* *

The sun is high overhead by the time the crumbling stone fortress of Enisala comes into view on the horizon. It feels wonderful, even if winter sun never warms one through the same way summer sun does; she drops her hood to bask in it, shifting her pack on her shoulders.

The ruins themselves are all beige-grey rock, the sky even more devoid of color, stormy and brooding. As she gets closer, though, she can see little pops of color all around the perimeter of the old fortress—blanket-draped caravans, colorful paper lanterns, artifacts of every culture each train has come into contact with over the past year. Anything to make the space lively.

This place has always felt oddly significant to her—with its ruins that no one will claim ownership over, that seem to belong only to themselves, like slumbering giants from the birth of the world. Really, anywhere on the eastern edge of a landmass would do, for the Speakers’ winter solstice celebrations. But this is where her family group has always come, and so she knows she will find them here. For a week on either side of the solstice, many trains gather here in the sprawl of the mysterious ruins, and they eat and dance and share stories, all the stories of the year before, and Sypha knows she has a few that will make even the elders jealous.

She smiles to herself, framing the narrative in her head as she sets off down the narrow, meandering path to the gathering below.

* *

“Sypha!” a familiar voice calls out, along with the clatter of scattered and dropped firewood; she’s barely made the edge of camp, is still lost in thought, but that voice would snap her out of just about anything.

“_Kiri_,” she oofs out, as the woman barrels into her, catching her up in a crushing embrace that’s more robes than anything else—layers and layers of them, to keep out the damp chill. Sypha hugs back just as hard; she’d been _expecting_ her family and the others, the ones she’d watched leave Greşit all those months ago and then had to say farewell to again late in the spring. She hadn’t been expecting Kiri, Kiri who knows all her secrets and remembers what she looked like when she was young enough to go about with her hair unshorn, who she spent more time with growing up than she did her own family—throwing rocks into rivers and climbing trees and playing rough games with the boys. Testing every limit, challenging every rule, pushing for every wild dream.

Kiri, who’d been away from their clan for at least three years now, off studying the healing arts with the Ottoman scholars when their own collective knowledge had proved insufficient for her. And isn’t it odd, how the friends of childhood are so often forgotten when the demands of adult life catch up, but the body never forgets what it’s like to hold them?

“I’m so glad you made it,” Kiri says, face buried in Sypha’s hair. “My first Solstice back with our people and you weren’t here! I was getting worried.”

“What, did you think I would miss it?” Sypha asks, faux indignance through her own laughter. “Never.”

“Well, I’ve been told that you have your hunter, now,” Kiri says, pulling away, a sudden swell of distance blooming between them. No wonder—too often, Speakers who marry outside the tribe never quite find their way back. She and Trevor hadn’t been that to each other the last time she’d seen her family, had just been circling ever closer without quite making contact, but fair assumptions could be, and often were, made. “And your soldier?”

“Mm, yes,” Sypha says; it’s been a long time since she’s thought of Adrian that way, though he’s never stopped fighting for them. “But this is important, being here. And seeing everyone again! How have your studies been?”

Kiri’s eyes flash with excitement, bright against the wind-bitten redness of her cheeks; any hesitance the previous topic had brought on evaporates in an instant. “It is incredible, Sypha! The things they know, in the south—the things they’ve kept track of, that others have forgotten. There is a book one man there has written on how to repair a person as if they were a torn garment or a broken wagon. It’s remarkable.” Adrian probably has a copy of that, somewhere in his mother’s medical library—if not, she’ll have to remember to track one down. “I understand why we do not record our _stories_, but after three years there, I wonder if we are foolish to not record knowledge itself? Raw knowledge I mean, the kind that is hard to frame in the context of a story.”

_My people are idiots_, she remembers saying, during that interminable stay in the Belmont hold; she’s usually more inclined to be generous, but there’d been an infectious kind of frustration and cynicism they’d all been fighting, after a certain point. 

“I’ve wondered that, too,” she says now, far more diplomatic; the journey has done her outlook a lot of good. “About an entirely different body of knowledge! Not something that would be as useful as the medicine you’re learning, but yes—if having something written down can save a life, how can that be wrong?” 

“Don’t let the elders hear you say that!” Kiri admonishes, laughing.

Sypha blows a dismissive breath through her nose. “I am sure they already think I’m a terrible member of our tribe, just for using violence against the enemies of humanity. I cannot imagine their opinion of me can get much worse.”

Kiri throws an arm over her shoulder, pulls her in. “It’s not _that_ bad,” she says, trying to be encouraging, but there's a tension there. “Our Sypha, the warrior of Wallachia. But I always knew you were destined for something special.”

Sypha frowns in thought, takes a few steps in silence. _Did you?_ She wants to ask, and she wants to ask, _why? _

Destined. Destiny is too large an idea, is the sort of thing that hovers around other people, people with remarkable families, with mysterious pasts. Sypha is a magician like any other Speaker magician; her father was the same, and his mother before him, and there is nothing unusual about any of it. These things run in families, and magic users are common, and sure, she'd gotten herself sucked up into an epic story because of it, but it could as easily have been another.

Couldn't it have?

Would another scholar of magic have done just as good a job? Would any magician have melded into the team as well as she did, have communicated in battle so effortlessly, have picked up the slack the other two dropped and protected them when they needed it? Could any magician have snatched Dracula’s castle out of the aether like it was a feather on the breeze? Would another Speaker have tossed aside the principles of a lifetime to stand up and fight, or is there really something dark and burning in her that sets her aside?

If there is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that even the question to be asking?

“...how _does_ it feel, to fulfill a prophecy?” Kiri asks, as they start to make their way toward the rest of the camp. It’s clear from the suddenly uncomfortable undercurrent in her voice that she’s not talking about the whole _killing Dracula_ part; that story, her family has already heard, and it’s surely made the rounds. No—she’s talking about the _rest_ of the prophecy. The part that’d had Sypha so uneasy clambering down into the catacombs and so defensive when she awoke there in the face of an obvious hunter; the part that she’d like to believe any random magician would _not_ have been able to fulfill.

“Strangely?” Sypha says, pitching her voice low. “Like I _did_ have a choice in the matter.”

“Truly? You did not feel fate’s hand pushing the issue?” A pause, a few scuffing steps in the snow. Then, carefully: “Or another hand entirely?”

And oh, Sypha understands why her old friend is concerned, understands all too well given the way the world has sometimes treated their people. How non-Speaker men have often regarded them—worldly and experienced and incapable of ever saying _no,_ as if rejection of the church’s self-loathing, oppressive morality somehow made them into succubi. But the implication is so absurd in context that she still laughs, conspiratorial. “No. My god. I had to push _them_. I thought I was going to go crazy.”

A smile then, more genuine. The tension drains out of the arm across Sypha’s shoulders. “What kind of heroic warriors _are_ they, if they’re not fighting for the hand of maiden fair?”

“In what world, I wonder, would I be considered a fair maiden?” Sypha asks, smiling despite herself. Her robes are ragged with wear, her hair recently chopped short again, her feet swathed in cloth bandages beneath her sandals to keep out the cold. Fair indeed. But she knows that society outside of their caravans frames the world in certain ways. “And they were fighting _with_ me, not for me.” 

“Still. Most would expect some sort of reward for saving the world—even if only from fate.”

Sypha shakes her head, remembering that sunrise through the castle doors, the way they’d all started drifting apart before she’d pulled them back together. Those first few hours of having no idea what to even do with themselves, in this tomorrow that they hadn’t expected to see. “We were all shocked to still be alive, in the end. I imagine that would be reward enough for anyone.”

Kiri looks to her feet, swallows. They walk in silence for a moment. It had, perhaps, been unfair to go into such dark territory—to invoke how close they’d all come to dying that night. But these are the stakes Sypha has gotten used to, the way she’s become accustomed to thinking of the world. Speakers don’t fight; they are always in danger from those who don’t understand them, but the memory of choosing to walk across an enemy’s threshold, certain she would not ever cross it again, is uniquely hers.

“If you met them,” she says, gently bringing the topic back around, “you would understand. They honestly _are_ good men. They understand what trust and respect are.” And they have enough baggage to fill an entire wagon, between them both, but that’s not for her to say. She’s not so dense as to think that they’d been dragging their feet just to frustrate her. “They do respect me, and I had to do nothing extraordinary to earn it—only what I’m truly capable of. We are equals.”

“Enough so that they trusted you to make this journey alone,” says a voice from her other side, mild and gentle, and Sypha turns without thinking, throwing herself into her grandfather’s arms.

“My angel,” he says, stroking her hair, and as it always does, her heart clenches up a little around something—something hard and painful, like a rock in her chest, that she has never understood.

She huffs a laugh against his robes, pushes through it. “It was more a matter of whether I trusted _them_ to survive a month without _me_.”

Kiri laughs, and her grandfather does too, and it warms her to know, with this kind of certainty, just how lucky she is.

* *

“…and it was in this way that the houses were joined, the scorched land of one family and the usurped fortress of their oldest enemy, and from the ashes of tragedy and loss and centuries of discord arose the hope of an unexpected and brilliant future.”

A long silence, broken up by the crackle of logs in the fire, by the quiet rustle of voices from elsewhere in the camp. There’s no need to pronounce the end of a story here, not if one is half decent at telling it; Sypha knows that they are just letting it sink in.

“A remarkable story, more so even than the first telling, which we have all heard,” one of the elders says, one she isn’t familiar with. In front of the old woman’s feet, a pair of young children are still staring raptly at Sypha. The elder’s voice is warm, pleased. “It will be quite a thing to add to our memory stores. And quite a thing to know that one of our own played a role, in such a difficult time for our country.”

“One of ours, one of Dracula’s, and one of their own that they threw out,” says a young man a few places to Sypha’s left; his voice carries the twist of a smile. “I wonder how the church must feel, in the face of such irony.”

And oh, that’s a thought that has given Sypha much satisfaction over the last year—to be a fly on the wall when the heads of the church met to discuss what had happened!—but the old woman frowns. “I imagine they feel as though they nearly caused the extinction of all human life in Wallachia,” she says, a touch sharp. “Perhaps that is enough?”

One of the children at her feet giggles, a sort of _look who’s in trouble_ kind of noise, and the man ducks his head. But he’s not in trouble. That isn’t how they do things. “Pardon me, Elder,” he says, “but I disagree. That they made a horrible mistake is knowledge that can fade or be downplayed over time. That they were saved by the very people they ostracized and cast out—that carries weight that cannot so easily be shrugged off. Even if we cannot share this with the rest of the people of Wallachia, that lesson should at least be _preserved_.”

_Because it is about hubris as much as it is about blame_, she can remember saying, after that first meeting they’d had with Acasă’s strange new church. _Blame can be washed away with a convincing enough apology, and hubris will make the same mistakes over and over again. Both must be undermined if any progress is to be made._

It had been a hard sell. Adrian tends to want to place blame if only to have something to aim all of his anger and sadness at, now that he’s allowed himself to start navigating them; Trevor only wants the world to feel more just than it is. But in the end she’d brought them around: more needs to be done than to just rub the church’s nose in the mess it’d made.

Which is why they’d agreed, in the end, for her to finally tell the story in its entirety—nothing masked or obfuscated, no details left aside. Only for her people’s ears; a _closed telling_, a rarely invoked practice used when the full story needs preserving but would put the participants in danger, should it get out into the general populace. The people of Acasă are just now starting to truly accept Trevor for who he is; tolerating a witch and a vampire is a bit much to expect of them, just yet.

“For whatever it’s worth,” she says now, “as a participant in the story? I agree. How this was ended, and by who, is just as important as who started it in the first place. There are lessons in both of those things."

The elder regards her for a long moment, thoughtful. Then nods, just a tiny dip of her face into the firelight. “Very well. This story will sit alongside the previous version. The nature of Wallachia’s saviors is to be preserved, as a means of emphasizing the church’s shortsightedness and the need for it to not repeat that mistake.”

Sypha nods deeply, a long and slow dip of her head nearly to her knees. “My thanks, Elder. May your tribe live happily and well, in the coming year.”

“And yours.”

* *

The crowd disperses, some going to hear or tell other stories, some retiring to their caravans for the evening meal. One figure stays nearby, hunched over a nearby fire, close enough to have heard her telling but not actually part of the group receiving it. In the fading light, the shape is just that: a shape, a silhouette, blue-black against the blue-white of the snow, limned in the cold violet light of sunset. They have a branch in their hands, are stripping it of its side-shoots methodically, tossing them one by one into the fire.

It’s a silhouette Sypha would know anywhere. 

“What stories have you to tell,” Sypha asks, settling down alongside her, the ritualistic question feeling strange in her mouth, “since this time last year?”

Kiri huffs a laugh. “None as exciting as yours. You’re a hard act to follow, Sypha.”

“You seemed excited about all the knowledge you’d gained, earlier.”

Twist, pull, snap. “That’s nothing, compared to having a grand destiny.”

“I still say that _destiny_ is too strong a word. We basically fell down a hole.” 

“Directly into the vault of Greşit’s sleeping soldier. At precisely the time the three of you were most needed. That sounds like _kismet_ to me.”

Sypha can’t help but laugh, remembering. “It felt more like incredible clumsiness, from where I was standing.”

“Falling.”

“From where I was falling, yes.”

A stretch of quiet, then, broken only by the crackling of the fire.

“So,” Kiri says after a while, tossing an entire handful of twigs into the flames. There’s a smile on her face but the firelight has turned it bitter, all shadows and edges. “Your soldier is a _vampire_.”

“Dhampir,” Sypha corrects, kneejerk. For so long, it’d been Trevor she was correcting, then after a while, Adrian himself; she’s used to being quick on the draw with it, because either of them saying _vampire_ had generally been a sign of badness brewing.

Kiri just breaks another few twigs free from the branch she’s stripping, twists them in her fingers. “I don’t know what that means.”

Right. Of course she doesn’t. “It means his mother was human.”

“Oh,” Kiri says, seemingly still not sure what to do with this information. “I knew that, I guess. From the story itself. I didn’t realize the distinction mattered.”

“Yes, it… it matters. A great deal. I do not think a true vampire would have ever sided with humanity.”

"Still. I wonder if I would have been able to guess, had we met in the summer instead of the winter."

Sypha plucks at the scarf around her neck, the wool scratchy but warm, dyed in a hundred vibrant colors. It’d come from the market in Acasă, knitted by an old blind woman, and had been a gift—gratitude for the work they’d done securing the town against the demon attacks. They had saved her son’s entire family, and gone home that night and celebrated it, a battle with no casualties save the demons themselves. She’s wearing it because of the cold, but she knows what Kiri is asking. "Perhaps."

A huff of breath. “So much for your gentle warriors.”

“You would probably be surprised,” Sypha says with a shrug, not even bothering to take offense on Adrian’s behalf, because she can tell this isn’t what Kiri’s actually upset about. Some people compare words to weapons, and it’s truer than they know; you can dodge and feint and mislead with them as well as you can with steel. “But that isn’t—Kiri. What’s going on?”

For a long moment, no reply. The fire cracks and pops, splitting the wood apart in a spattering of sparks. Kiri throws the whole branch into it like a spear, a hard burst of frustration.

“Taerna married, this summer,” she finally says, the words quiet. 

That stops Sypha cold, her fingers poised in mid-reach for a branch of her own. She curls them back up around the empty air, feels the nails bite into her palm. “She always said she would wait for you.”

“Why should she have bothered? We were only _friends_.”

“You were more than that.”

“She married,” Kiri repeats, short, face tightening as if to hold something inside. “Like all of my sisters did. Marriage and children and… it’s all anyone does. We had _plans_. We were going to, to _travel_, and she was going to hunt our food and I was going to _heal people_ and we were going to see the world together. But this is the only life anyone seems to care about.”

_And even you’re going down that path_, Sypha can hear, unsaid. _You and your prophecy, your exiled hunter and your inhuman soldier._

Sypha closes her eyes, takes a breath. “She cares about you.”

“She also cares about her hound.”

“She _loves_ you,” Sypha says, insistent.

Kiri laughs, bitter, tears threatening. It’s like watching an old dam crumble, flawless limestone threading through with cracks and stress fractures, and then: an outrushing of things held back for far too long. “Not _enough_,” she says, curling forward over herself, arms tight around her belly. “Not more than she loved the idea of having a child. Not enough to _be_ with me.”

“Oh, Kiri. I’m sorry,” Sypha says, threading an arm over her shoulders, pulling her in. “I’m sorry.”

“Do yours love you?” Kiri asks after a moment, muffled by the layers of robes. “Enough to change the world, to defy everything for you?”

Sypha thinks about Trevor punching Dracula in a ridiculous, suicidal attempt to keep him away from her, thinks about Adrian in her garden, enduring the sun to make her happy—about a castle and a watchtower and the ending of the story she’d told, and her grasp on her friend tightens. “They do. And each other.”

A laugh into her shoulder, rough and wet. “I’ve always thought it would be terrible, to be involved in a prophecy,” she says, barely audible. “I never thought I’d be so jealous.”

* *

There’s a stream that runs past the ruins, a narrow but swift-moving current that cuts through the ground here like a knife. It leads into the tough, gnarled pines and firs that grow this close to the sea, into these dark and uninviting woods that are nevertheless filled with a thousand secret places.

Sypha follows it, as she always has, year after year. 

Things are different, this year.

She finds them by the water, bundled up and talking quietly. There’s a fire burning, but it’s been banked and allowed to subside down to embers, giving off heat but very little light. In the heavily filtered winter moonlight, they look like faery folk—Arn with his delicate, dignified features, Lily with the luminescent white bone beads threaded into hair the color of pitch, both of them beautiful and earnest.

They look up when she steps closer, their faces dark, shadowed. Painfully anxious.

She sits down on the ground, near to them, facing them. She is just as filled with anxiety. She has never done this, has no idea how to approach it—she knows they are not being blindsided like Kiri was, knows they have had time to adjust to the idea of this, but all she can see is her old friend’s face, broken up in grief over a friend-love she—and everyone else—had thought was something more. For once in her life, Sypha cannot find the words.

Then Lily smiles, the brilliant, passionate smile Sypha remembers, and holds out her hands, and Sypha lets herself fall into the woman’s arms, nearabout crushing her in the embrace.

“It’s all right,” she whispers, against Sypha’s ear. “You’ve found your loves. It was always bound to happen to one of us.”

Sypha nods against her, feeling the tears welling up. Turns to embrace Arn, the familiarity of his touch painful in this context, in knowing what she has to do.

“Are you set to marry?” Arn asks, quiet, solemn.

Sypha shakes her head. “I haven’t brought up the subject yet. There are a lot of complications—no human establishment would ever welcome us. But...”

“But you would like to.”

“Yes.”

“Will you come back to _us_ then, for the ceremony?” Lily asks, and her voice sounds like the fear of paths diverging, not knowing if they will ever converge again. “Or even just to visit? You know there are none here who wouldn’t welcome all of you—or if there are…”

“Lily will convince them to change their minds,” Arn finishes for her, a small smile at the corner of his mouth.

Sypha closes her eyes, takes Lily’s hand. “Of course. I could not stay away for long. And you can always visit us—we’ll have a lot of space, once we rebuild.”

Visiting, seeing old friends: it’s not the same, won’t ever be the same. And sometimes things change, and people change and what they are to each other changes. But these two were always dear friends first and foremost, and that will never—can never—be any different. She gathers them both into her arms, and it’s a sweet, comfortable place to be.

“Please tell me,” Arn whispers into her hair after another long moment, “that Belmont at least bathes regularly, now?”

And like that, the seriousness of the night vanishes, goes up like a twist of smoke into the black. Sypha laughs, and keeps laughing, until it turns to tears again and she can’t sort out which she’s feeling more of. 

“Yes,” she says, with a little hiccup of sob-laughter. “He does. He fights the darkness and protects the innocent—like he was born for. And washes the monster blood off, after.”

“Good,” Arn says, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “We could tell from the beginning that he was capable of being more than he was.”

A long measure of silence, only the water rushing past, too swift to freeze even in the heart of winter.

“Will you let us give you a proper farewell?” Lily asks, hesitant. “Do they know—”

“They know,” Sypha says, biting her lip. “I talked with them about it before I left. They don’t mind.” _As long as it’s a farewell, _she hears Trevor saying, laughter in his voice even as he’d tried to be serious about this, _And not a ‘till next time’._

Adrian had just been quiet, and had smiled softly in that way that is always disarming to her, and had simply said that traditions, and closure, are important. For everyone involved.

“Do _you_ want this from us?” Lily asks. “Whether they mind is not the only question.”

It’s secluded in the little copse of trees, even the starlight blocked by the arching branches thick with green needles, and warm from the banked fire. Sypha nods, and reaches out with both hands, palms up in invitation. They each press a kiss to her open hands, and they hold her and she holds them, all of them swathed in the shadows of this secret place. She lets them say goodbye to this part of their collective lives, lets them put their hands and their mouths on her and push her to giddy exhaustion—one last gift from her youth, and one that will have to hold her over through the winter chill until these two weeks are out and she can begin to make her way home.

When they wander back to camp late that night, appetites sated and tension shaken away, things are different between them, always will be different, now—but that’s all right, in the end. Change, like liquor in a wound, can sting, but it is sometimes the only thing that makes the blood run truly clean.

* *

The next day passes quickly and well. She gives her grandfather the gifts that Adrian and Trevor had sent along with her; scouring the castle library, Adrian had found a rare volume of supposedly true stories from the far east that he thought the tribe would appreciate having to add to their memory stores, and Trevor, feeling some cabin fever in all of the early season snow they’ve gotten, has taken up carving—which is to say, he isn’t very good at it yet, may never really be. But the two simplistic figures he’s sent are easily recognizable as rough caricatures of priests, one missing a finger and one missing an eye. _In memory of the day we all met!_ he’d said, performative, trying to disguise the sentimentality as tactless humor.

Her grandfather laughs to himself as he holds the figures up, and she can tell he’s trying hard to mask how entertained he is; violence is so anathema to their people and yet, somehow, this particular act of violence never seems to have unsettled him. Context, she supposes; Trevor _had_ been acting specifically to save his life, and he could have done far worse.

She wanders the camp, looks at all of the lovely exotic decorations, and plays with the children, an odd pang in her heart as she watches their innocent games. She helps prepare lunch, lighting the fires for the ones doing the cooking, chopping vegetables and kneading dough for flatbread, and she goes into the woods with Kiri to gather more firewood—they will need a lot of it, tonight. 

They don’t talk, while they gather. It’s not awkward; just an understanding that the space between them needs some quiet, needs time to breathe.

She visits with the others in her family, with the surrogate aunts and uncles that are not actually related to her by blood, with the childhood playmates and the mentors, and with Taerna and her husband, a man from another tribe who’d chosen to join hers instead of the other way around, had chosen to take her name. He seems sweet enough, and Taerna seems happy, if a little haunted around the edges of her eyes. Everyone she asks says that yes, of course they will be there, tonight.

Last night had been for stories, and tomorrow will be as well. But tonight is for celebration. All things in equal measure.

Hours in, Sypha drops onto one of the logs around the edges of the clearing; she slumps forward with a happy groan, reaching to rub the knots and strings out of her calves. Her walking muscles are conditioned like no others, but dancing muscles are a different story. It’s a good ache, though, like that burn in the cheeks that comes from too much smiling, too much laughter. She feels overheated from the exertion and the fire, no matter the chill in the air, and she unwinds the scarf, loosens the top layer of her robes to let the air move through.

Between where she sits and where the fire burns, silhouettes move, a chaotic display of human joy and beauty. They have no structured dances, really, though longtime partners often grow into each other’s steps. She can smell warm food nearby, bread and stew and hot mead, sees all of her family and friends and the strangers that come here as well, all her people, all dressed as she is, and wonders again: could any of them, the ones with magic at least, have done what she did?

She stares into the fire, remembers the feel of the castle’s engine between her fingers, the way she’d felt reality bending and brittle fracturing around her, so much more power at her disposal in that moment than she’d ever brought to bear conjuring fire or ice—and she thinks that no, maybe not. She’s met other magicians; she’s not sure any of them have ever trapped an eldritch monstrosity or blown apart an Enochian ward or—or done the things she’s come here to learn how to do. The things her father and her grandmother could do.

Later. Later, when the Nasaii tribe arrives. They should be here by morning. She will learn what she needs to, and she will go home, and she will be able to protect that home more thoroughly than she ever has before.

In the meantime, she watches the dancers, contemplates getting some stew, contemplates whether her legs will fall off if she tries—watches Arn and Lily together on the far side of the clearing, twisting in a tight curl that makes Lily’s hair lift, the fire lighting up her bone beads and glinting in Arn’s eyes. Watches the children imitating the adults, the youngest pairing off with their siblings, stumbling all over each other. Watches strong, tough Taerna with her husband, insisting on leading him, as much as anyone can lead in this sort of dance. 

Watches the elder she’d told her story to last night, sitting across the fire from her, watching Sypha right back with a gentle smile that says _don’t worry,_ that says _you will be with them soon._

And there’s nothing inherently romantic about these dances on the solstice—friends dance with friends, parents with children, and many dance alone—but she remembers being young and _everything_ being about those early, tentative relationships, remembers that there was a thrill in getting the chance to dance with those people she called heart-mates, or to be asked to dance by someone she wished to be that close to.

So she can’t help but smile when she sees Taerna whisper something to her husband and break away from him, sidle hesitantly up to where Kiri sits. She’s poking at the dirt with a crooked, bare stick, and her sandals haven’t touched the dance ring—are clean of the dust and soot that coats the ground here, the remains of a hundred years of bonfires.

Taerna holds out a hand, uncertain.

It won’t solve all of the problems, won’t make Kiri’s love hurt less or magically mend things between them. But there’s something of healing in Kiri’s eyes as she reaches up to take that hand, leaves the stick behind in the dirt, lets herself be pulled up and into the ring of dancers, the two of them falling into each other’s space with an ease that says _we belong here_, that says _even if we must change, there is still _us, that says _you will never be a stranger in these arms._

*

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Speakers are lovely! But even their way of doing things has its issues to deal with, and some are pretty un-fun.
> 
> Notes:  
1\. The ruins at Enisala are real. Even in the late 1400s, they'd already been abandoned long enough that no one knew who built them. AFAIK, they're still standing.  
2\. The book Kiri is referring to is Cerrahiyyetü'l Haniyye (Imperial Surgery) by Serefeddin Sabuncuoğlu, written in 1465. That doesn't actually matter, I'm just a fucking nerd.  
3\. 'Kismet' wasn't used in English until the 1800s, but it has Arabic roots and these folks aren't speaking English anyway, so fuck it.  
4\. LILY IS THE BEST I LOVE HER SO MUCH HERE HAVE A DRAWING OF HER: [LILY](https://i.imgur.com/fgPC3QR.jpg)  
5\. If you're wondering how Trevor and Alucard are doing, no worries, we'll be bopping back to the castle in the next chapter!


	2. Chapter 2

*

It has been a cold goddamned winter in the Carpathian foothills of eastern Wallachia, and it’s barely gotten started.

Trevor kicks the wet, clumpy snow from his boots. It’s starting to come down again, gathering in the fur at the collar of his cloak—not as thick or impressively fluffy as his old one, but the wool’s not worn through in a dozen places and he doesn’t exactly sleep under trees these days, so it’s fine—and the sky is doing something foreboding and miserable out here, clouds roiling and grey and apocalyptic.

Shitbutt bounces at his heels, half-swallowed by the snow every time he lands and not seeming to mind at all, and okay, that’s kind of hilarious. One bright spot.

Trevor grins, eases the service door open with his hip, maneuvering the pile of cordwood in his arms around the tall, spiny bushes that nearly obscure it from view. It isn’t that heavy, but it’s awkward as hell, and all that axe-work in the frigid air has left him achy. Between that and the weather and the fact that they _already have enough fucking firewood, for god’s sake,_ it’s time to call it a day.

“C’mon, boy,” he mumbles, jerking his head toward the door; the little beast trots obediently inside, trailing mud and snow and making a mess Adrian will probably pitch a fit over later.

In the little anteroom, heat radiates from more of those copper pipes, filling the space. It seeps in through his clothes, settles against his skin, chasing out the chill; Trevor stands there for a moment, just breathing it in and letting his lungs thaw out—giving the ward over the inner door a chance to recognize him. Boots toed off, then onward: through the labyrinthine passageways that he somehow has learned by heart and that have even stopped somersaulting on him, as if the castle has finally accepted that a little maze solving isn’t going to scare him away.

In the sitting room, there’s already a fire going. Adrian is lounging in one of the soft chairs that he’s pulled right up next to it, one steaming mug in his hand, another on the table next to him. 

“You look comfortable,” Trevor says, only halfway meaning the dig, because that’s about all he ever manages these days. A lot of the time, he doesn’t mean it at all. He crosses the room, starts stacking the wood with the rest of it.

“Mm. I am, yes.”

“Must be nice to duck out of chores early.”

That earns him a raised eyebrow and an indulgent grin, Adrian turning his head to regard him. “I cut just as much wood as you did. It’s not my fault I’m faster at it than you are.”

Nope, that would be Dracula’s fault. Trevor grins to himself, shakes his head, doesn’t say it.

“Anyway,” Adrian continues, “someone had to actually start the fire and heat up the wine, else you’d never thaw out.” He picks up the second mug by the rim, holds it out in offering, and it smells incredible—mulled and spicy and sharp, steam curling lazily toward the ceiling. 

But there’s no third mug, and as always, that dampens his enthusiasm a bit. Trevor sighs, takes it by the handle, takes a careful sip to gauge the heat. It’s perfect, it’s always perfect, but.

“You look stiff,” Adrian says, watching him move. Dodging the obvious.

Another sip, and this one goes down better, cloves lingering in his nose. “It’s just the cold,” Trevor says, because it is. He can remember waking up feeling this way every single winter morning for years, even with the thicker cloak—like he’d turned to ice overnight and his body was just gradually relearning how to be made of flesh. Wages of the wanderer. “Makes everything sort of seize up. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

“Or twenty or thirty, if left to your own devices.” Adrian takes a long pull from his own mug and sets it aside, points to the floor in front of his chair. “Sit.”

“Really?” Trevor smirks, doesn’t budge. “What am I, the damn dog?”

“No, the dog doesn’t argue half so much.” Adrian sits up straighter in the chair, beckons with a waving hand. “I’ve been in front of the fire long enough that my hands aren’t even cold. Stop being difficult.”

Stop being difficult; he may as well be asking Trevor to stop breathing air. But there’s also the thought of getting those hands on him without having to do any work for it—aside from all the wood-chopping—and that’s undeniably appealing.

“Fine,” he says, sweeping the cloak off and hanging it on one of the pegs near the fire to dry out. He unhooks the Morning Star from his belt, settles to the floor in front of Adrian’s chair, the weapon coiled up within easy reach. These are tricky times, and knowing he’s prepared for outside threats lets him relax more fully, falling into a lax, messy slump, sockfeet trailing out toward the fire.

Strong, delicate hands alight on his shoulders first, start working their way downward from there, and as usual, Trevor is all at once overwhelmed: the heat from the fire, from the wine, from Adrian’s touch. It’s too soft, too much—too much comfort, too much warmth, too much safety. It’s strange how he never felt this way back when the weather was mild; only now that it’s miserable out there and he’s experiencing these bursts of cold and discomfort again is his body reminding him that that is, in fact, what it’s accustomed to.

Whatever. It can fucking well get accustomed to _this_. He leans back into the touch, groaning as those fingers dig in under his shoulderblades with impossible precision, loosening the corded stiffness there, letting the tension drain away. 

“Enjoying yourself?” Adrian teases, the voice right next to his ear.

“Fuck you, of course I am,” Trevor laughs, as Adrian drags his hands lower, thumbs sliding down along his spine and working the long bands of muscle that run the length of it. “That feels incredi— agh, _Christ_,” he cuts off, as Adrian finds a knotted up little locus of ache; the sharpness of the pain when he really digs in is enough to take Trevor’s breath away. “Right there, yeah.”

Adrian obliges him, focusing his attentions. “This isn’t just from the cold.”

“No, that’s from using the axe in the same hand all day,” Trevor mutters, wincing around the discomfort; this doesn’t feel good, but it needs doing. “Should have changed it up. Stupid.”

A momentary pause from behind him, hands stilling; then they resume again, and Adrian says nothing. 

“What,” Trevor says, “No commentary on that? You’re losing your touch.”

A spike of pain as Adrian twists a finger into the knot, with just a measured touch of sharpness; then the ache fades, as Trevor feels the muscle release its torturous, twisted-up grip on itself. That is—that is basically _magic, _holy _shit_. 

“You aren’t stupid,” Adrian mutters, distracted, soothing over the spot. “And you don’t need me to tell you that. If anything, you’re a little short on common sense, which—well, neither of us are very good about that, on our own.”

On their own. The two of them. So very much not the way this was meant to be, even if it is just temporary, even if it is so, so much better than actually being alone. 

“I’d trade away common sense for what I _do_ know any day,” Trevor grumbles. “Common sense stuff isn’t anywhere near as likely to kill you when you fuck it up.”

“In your case, I’d give it even odds,” Adrian says, the familiar, infuriating sass bleeding into his tone even as his hands keep up their work, gently easing the ache from his muscles. “I’ve seen you nearly killed preparing breakfast.”

Oh, for god’s sake. “That was _one time_.”

He can almost _feel_ Adrian frown. “One time feels like once too many, given how many actual, serious threats we have to deal with,” he says, and there it is, there’s the real issue—the actual thing that’s causing both of them so much tension. The spectre that’s been hanging over them for days.

“Fine,” Trevor says, trying to keep the sudden swell of despair out of his voice. “I get it; I’m not stupid, I’m just a walking disaster.”

Adrian’s hands still—then he brings them up to the back of Trevor’s neck, thumbs digging into the base of his skull, forcing him to cant his head forward as the tension unravels. Fingers slide forward to card through his hair. “Trevor. What’s really wrong?”

“What, besides the threat of impending attack, the fact that we don’t have any real allies to speak of, and the cornerstone of our defense plans not being here?” The words imply irritation, but Trevor can’t find the actual emotion in his voice. He just sounds tired, at least to himself. He takes an awkward sip of the wine, finds he’s nearly at the bottom of the mug. Quietly: “God, Adrian. I really miss her. I’m not—I’m not used to missing anyone.”

Another long pause, this one contemplative; then Adrian slips down from the chair, lithe form folding itself effortlessly beside him. He leans into Trevor’s space, deliberate. “Am I not enough for you?” he asks, and it’s so obviously a joke, so blatantly an attempt to distract him, and that makes something warm flutter in Trevor’s chest.

“Nope,” he replies, not looking up; he can feel a smirk tugging at his lips.

“Oh, my wounded feelings,” Adrian sighs, dramatic. “However shall I survive?”

“You’ll make it.”

“I think—I think I’m going to swoon.” 

“Oh my god,” Trevor mumbles, because this is so utterly ridiculous, but he makes no move to put a stop to it when Adrian sprawls across his lap in a theatrical faint, his back bowing in such a way as to pull his shirt taut against all the—frankly gorgeous—musculature of his torso, and he is _so_ doing this on purpose, the utter _bastard_. 

Which means he deserves whatever comes next.

Trevor puts his mug aside, sets his hand on the flat, tight expanse of Adrian’s belly. Lets it sit there a moment, heavy and warm. Gives the other man time to consider where the hand might decide to go next.

Then he crooks his fingers in tight against Adrian’s side, spider-walking them across his ribs—and Adrian lets out the breath he’d been holding _explosively_, curls his body around Trevor’s hand in a spasm of hysterics. He rolls out of Trevor’s lap and onto the floor, mindless with laughter.

Here’s a truth that Trevor had been delighted to learn, about a month ago: Adrian Țepeș, the cold, unflappable bastard, the stoic dhampir that can take a knee to the dick without flinching, is _ticklish._

Another truth: he only tolerates exploitation of this fact for so long before retaliating with force he can’t necessarily control. Trevor ended up with a wall-shaped bruise down his side and a very apologetic Adrian on his hands the first time he pushed this too far, so he has learned to extract a little laughter from him and then _stop._

And stop he does, and teases him about it like he always does, and lets Adrian use his lap as a pillow as repayment, and it’s nice—another day, other circumstances, and Trevor could fall asleep like this, sprawled before the fire, a warm hand tucked into his own, the weight of Adrian’s presence soothing against all the worries and tensions. 

But they’ve heard wolves in the night, recently.

And something’s missing.

* *

They’ve commandeered another of these generic parlors as a study-slash-strategy room; books sit in stacks on the floor, relocated here from both libraries, everything they could find on the history of vampire activity in this area, on the history of the town—even on linguistics, Sypha hoping to pin the archaic variant of French they’d found on the tree down to a specific region and time-frame. All she’s been able to figure out so far is that it’s probably been out of use since the 1200s, which neither makes any sense nor helps them in any way.

They’d made a charcoal rubbing of the carving, and it’s pinned to the wall here, in among Adrian’s rough house designs and floorplans, rough drafts of besti—_compendium_ entries and mockups of illustrations. 

It was joined, four days ago, by a new rubbing—this one of a carving they found very near the first one, in the heartwood of a tree much more freshly flayed:

_The longest night is coming. Be ready._

...or something like that. Again, his French is rusty, and this is the same stupid dialect again, so he’s relying on Adrian’s translation. It doesn’t really matter—the gist is clear enough, and it’s nothing but bad news, even if it’s more unequivocally a warning rather than a threat.

To make things worse, it had appeared only after Sypha had left, to visit her family, to delve into some of the deeper magics of her people. To visit her people for the _Solstice_. Which means she won’t be here for whatever’s coming—and a tiny part of Trevor is grateful for that, but it shrinks in fear before the reality that they _kind of need her,_ and also that she will be _incredibly_ pissed off if she gets back in a month and finds them dead and the castle overrun by vampires. Possibly pissed enough to take up necromancy just so she can give them a piece of her mind.

It’s a shitty situation. Trevor, frankly, has no idea what to do about it. 

They still have the mirror, at least—the one up in Dracula’s old study, the one that matter, and _people_, can pass through. Worst to worst, they can probably find her and bring her back that way. It’s something they’ve been loath to do too soon, given how useful this new bag of tricks will be if she actually pulls it off.

This is why all the firewood, though—stacks and stacks of it, more than they should need for the entire winter, in case of a prolonged siege. Trevor cleaned out the dry goods vendor in the Acasă market two days ago, and the stall selling preserves, and while he got some strange looks for it, he hadn’t been sure if it was on account of him being a Belmont or on account of him being a crazy hoarder that needed thirty-seven jars of pickled vegetables. Adrian’s been laying in bandages and medicines, and the hares Trevor’s managed to hunt up in the deep snow are drying into jerky in a cellar somewhere in the guts of the castle. 

Trevor’s also gone through the hold, meticulously sorting every weapon he could lay hands on into ‘consecrated’ or ‘useless’. He’s stashed as many of the former as he can into hidey holes all around the castle; finding out that Adrian could actually use the damn things had been a bit of a game changer. 

They’ve fortified every entrance, and some of the larger windows. Secured some of the internal doors too, to section off the castle into safe and compromised regions if necessary. He even managed to get his hands on a pretty large supply of holy water, though he hasn’t figured out what to _do_ with it, yet. 

It’s not bad, for four days’ preparation.

It has also been a monstrous amount of work. No, he doesn’t only hurt from the cold. But it all has to be done, if they want to get through this.

And Trevor’s still not afraid of dying, not by a long shot—but he does have a _preference_ in the matter, these days.

* *

“Ah, shit.”

He’d just been planning to board over this window. The wood and nails and hammer are right there on the chest of drawers. It was only by some strange impulse that Trevor decided to take a look out onto the grounds first—and there they are, faces as pale in the moonlight as the snow, creeping up the main path like the creepy vampire fucks that they are. Six of them. Tightly clumped, easy to take out all at once if he can get the drop on them.

It’s not the solstice yet. And this group is nowhere near big enough to be something worth leaving them cryptic warnings about. He still bolts down the stairs at speed to where he’s pretty sure he left Adrian working on one of the inner doors. “_Adrian_—_!_”

“I see them,” the dhampir says, damnably calm, appearing from around a turn in the staircase—forcing Trevor to pull to a stumbling halt. He’s got something made of cloth folded over his arm, burgundy and gold, and he holds it out. “Put this on.”

Trevor blinks, thrown off. He’s already got the Morning Star in hand, is already gearing up in his head, thinking through attack strategies—and Adrian wants him to play fucking _dress-up?_

“It will earn you more respect,” Adrian says, response to his unspoken skepticism. “Which could prevent this escalating into a fight. If it _does_ come to bloodshed, this will protect you more than anything you’re wearing now.”

Right. That whole bit, where Adrian’s trying to remedy their ‘no allies’ problem—and the closely related ‘all the other vampires think he’s a weird hermit with a human fetish like his dad’ problem—by reaching out to nearby clans and covens, offering protection and, maybe more importantly, a _voice_ to those who would prefer coexistence to mindless slaughter.

It’s too low a morality bar, as far as Trevor’s concerned. And the whole thing reeks of _terrible, suicidally stupid idea._ But he hadn’t had a better one, so here they are, about to go _talk_ to a bunch of fucking vampires when all the chainwhip at his side wants to do is rip through them like a scythe through wheat.

“What the hell _is_ this?” he asks, taking the garment with one hand, tucking the Morning Star back onto his belt with the other. Shaking it out as they take the stairs two at a time, he can see that it’s some kind of—it’s a coat, trimmed in gold like Adrian’s poncey thing. Shorter though, and the same deep red as the tapestries down in the hold, with the Belmont crest emblazoned over the left breast in the same gold—

Crowned by the abstract silhouette of a dragon’s head, wings spread.

Oh, fuck no.

“There’s an inner silk layer,” Adrian babbles, “to protect against piercing weapons. The linen should be sufficient to—”

Oh, oh _fuck no._ Trevor grabs Adrian by the upper arm; he doesn’t have enough strength to actually stop him should he not want to be stopped, but Adrian comes to a halt anyway, spinning on Trevor with impatience flooding his features.

Trevor jabs a finger at the dragon. “That’s fucking _Dracula’s_.”

“No,” Adrian says, softening, sighing in frustration. “It isn’t.”

“I’ve _seen—_”

“You’ve seen a red dragon, facing the other direction. I understand your own family seal doesn’t use much in the way of traditional heraldic symbols, but please trust me when I say that those changes _matter.”_

“You didn’t tell us you were—”

“Trevor. This is very, _very_ much not the time for this conversation.”

And damn him, he’s right. Fine. _Fine, _okay. He pulls the damn thing on; it fits surprisingly well, nestling across his shoulders like it was made specifically for him, and of course, it had been. No restriction of movement that he can pick up on. Nothing flappy to get twisted up or caught on an enemy’s weapon.

Okay. He can work with this.

“You do whatever you have to,” he says, as they reach the main hall. “I’m going to be ready to take their heads off when diplomacy breaks down.”

“Such little faith in my ability.”

“It’s not what _you’re_ gonna do that I’m worried about.”

* *

The last time this had happened, which was also the first time it’d happened, they’d been caught completely flatfooted. They’d been walking home from the night market, in good spirits, that damn chicken Trevor had been so insistent on sitting idiotically in its wicker cage, swinging from Adrian’s grip. They’d all been armed, but otherwise dressed for a trip to town—nothing fancy, just warm and comfortable clothes that wouldn’t draw attention. Sypha had been carrying some cabbage. Trevor’d been gesturing with a loaf of bread like it was a sword. They had been, in retrospect, completely ridiculous—and then they’d just about stumbled over a group of vampires, waiting on their front lawn.

Not attacking. Not making ready to attack. Tense and agitated, sure, but standing around like they wanted to _talk_. And that had, in fact, been what they’d wanted.

It’d taken some quick thinking on Adrian’s part—drop his hair into his face before they could get a look at him, pretend to just be another servant, promise to head up and get the master of the castle for them—but they’d gotten past the interlopers and inside, and Adrian had changed and held an impressively competent audience with them for having no time at all to prepare. They’d wanted nothing more than to promise the fealty of their small group; they’d stayed out of the war, had no particular love for humans but saw no need for killing them without reason, and of all of those vying for power in a world after Dracula’s fall, they saw Alucard of Wallachia as the most likely to pretty much just leave them alone.

It had gone middling-well. They hadn’t been eager to swear off killing for food—though they saw the logistical sense in keeping their donors alive when possible—and they had ignored Trevor and Sypha as if they were court pets, but compared to the throat-ripping murder-happy lunatics Trevor’s faced down in his day, it had been a start. 

They’d left satisfied. Adrian had felt confident he’d pulled off his little deception. 

Then Sypha had reached up and pulled a stray chicken feather from his hair.

The group had never come back, never called him out on it. Maybe they had been spectacularly unobservant. Maybe they just hadn’t given a fuck, as long as they were left alone.

Trevor’s chicken stew, full of doughy dumplings and parsnips and carrots, and mushrooms from the woods nearby, and lots of Sypha’s herbs and just two little cloves of garlic—well within Adrian’s tolerance threshold—had been spectacular, for as long as they’d had to wait for it. 

* *

So now he’s following Adrian out to the main entry hall at a tight clip, grip on his weapon unfaltering. It’s a more inviting space than it used to be: more lighting, and the carpets all replaced, the new ones a detailed pattern in gold and black, less gloomy and more expansively regal than their predecessors. By the time they’re halfway down the top flight of stairs, the castle’s doors have started to creak open ponderously; Adrian halts them on the landing before the second flight.

Below, the group from the yard wanders nervously inside. They look like they expect the floor to suddenly turn to lava, or to open up and drop them into a pit of holy water.

Actually, that’s not a terrible idea. He’ll have to talk to Sypha about that when she gets back.

But: The vampires. They climb the stairs, when they could just float. They show proper respect. And in the end, their nervousness makes sense.

“We are a small order, but we’re growing,” the female vampire in the lead says, and even Trevor can hear the uncertainty underlying the veneer of confidence. “We choose to value the presence of humanity on the earth—not simply for food, but for their own contributions to the collective culture of sentience.” Her eyes drift away from Adrian, land on Trevor for a moment, then shift back. “We have heard that the heir to this court holds similar beliefs, and we’ve travelled far to reach you.”

Trevor has to admit: this is gutsy. They’re putting themselves out there, in a show of ‘weakness’ that any other vampire lord wouldn’t hesitate to punish with exile or death. On the basis of a _rumor_, with the only confirmation being the fact that the infamous Alucard’s got a human standing alongside him, neither enthralled nor bound. Armed. Wearing his seal.

“As long as that remains your practice,” Adrian says; the skepticism doesn’t make it into his voice, but Trevor can see it in the cant of his face, in his eyes, “then you will be welcome here. We will provide protection and representation when the need arises, in exchange for your allegiance to our causes.”

And that’s some serious bullshit—vague promises and requests for help with causes unspecified—but apparently that’s how these things are done, because the leader of the group seems unperturbed. “Of course, my Lord. My people are yours.”

* *

So: suddenly, they seem to have allies. Maybe. If they can be trusted.

Maybe Adrian had been right about the stupid jacket after all. Appearances do, sometimes, matter.

* *

The vampires leave a few hours before sunup, their destination unclear. Trevor boards up more windows. They catalogue supplies, weapons, defenses. Adrian helps him rig up some nonsense with the holy water and the system of pipes that are already feeding most of the castle; it’ll be diluted, but maybe it’ll still help in a pinch.

They crawl into bed together at the end of the day, exhausted and weary. Trevor knows he’s going to sleep poorly; has done so for the past week or so, ever since Sypha left. 

Ugh, no. She went on a trip. She didn’t _leave_.

“So. That was new,” he mumbles into Adrian’s hair, after about ten minutes of trying, and failing, to drift off.

“Mm?”

“Those vampires,” he clarifies, tucking himself closer; it’s not an easy thing. It seems like they’re all angles and edges some nights, pieces that don’t quite come together, without—

“Ah,” Adrian says, understanding. His own posture softens, opens up, allows Trevor to find their fit. “They were a strange group, yes. I can’t say I expected any of my people to be quite that adamant about not killing.”

“They’re not really your people,” Trevor says, yawning. Maybe that’s rude, but it’s late and he’s exhausted.

And Adrian is, apparently, too tired to take offense. “I know. Easier than spelling out the details every time; indulge me.”

“Fiiine.”

“You’re right, though.” Adrian’s voice sounds odd, distant. “I’m not completely sure whether to trust them. Perhaps it’s my own biases; all the vampires I’ve known have been kowtowing to my father’s court. But it isn’t an attitude I thought existed.”

Trevor sighs, pulling the blanket tighter around his chin. Vampires that don’t want to kill. No, more than that: that _want_ to _not_ kill. Truly unprecedented?

For a moment, he’s fourteen again, hungry and tired and injured and bleeding, the whip in his hands barely obeying him, desperate to prove himself and the honor of his name and how else to do that, except by killing vampires?

Through the window glass, the starlight makes no dent in the darkness, barely illuminates the snow. He closes his eyes.

_Back off, kid,_ the beast taunts in his mind, and thirteen years past, his temper flares, indignant rage. _Neither of us wants me to kill you._

He tightens his grip on Adrian, feels a reciprocal squeeze around his shoulders. In his mind’s eye: just another dead monster, blood slicking the end of the whip. Just another hunt. Just doing the work he’d been born for.

“They’re out there,” he murmurs, the truth of it sticking in his heart like a knife.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So things aren't all fun and games back at the Tepes-Belnades-Belmont estate, but I think we all knew this kind of shit was coming. But it seems like word is getting around, and Alucard is getting popular, in certain circles. They're the sort of pacifist outcast circles, admittedly, but that's better than nothing! 
> 
> ...right?
> 
> Also: Local garbage-pail kid gets fancy new clothes, is totally uncomfortable, wishes people would just let him wear the same potato sack he's been wearing for the last seven years: the novel.


	3. Chapter 3

*

_[The trees whip by, a blur of grey-black-grey-black. She’s looking for something, or someone, needs desperately to find whatever it is and how will she ever find it if she doesn’t stop running?_

_But she can’t stop running._

_The wolf behind her (beside her, upon her, snapping at her heels, running running running and not ever stopping because why should it ever have to stop) is monstrous and white, but it isn’t Adrian, could never be Adrian—she catches a reflection of its eyes in the low-hanging fog and they’re blue, pale and cold, chips of ice, and there’s blood running from its teeth and it isn’t her blood, she knows it isn’t. And the wolf can’t be Adrian because Adrian is—_

_And Trevor is—_

_Her chest aches and burns with every step, like she’s been stabbed, like she’s been torn open. The forest is a bedroom is a field is an alley between two taverns, the rowdy noises drifting down from open windows, and she wants to scream for them to help but if she even pauses to draw breath the wolf will be upon her and—_

_And it isn’t her blood._

_The wolf howls, and all around her, others take up the chorus.]_

* *

The Speaker camp seems silent when Sypha jolts out of bed, no other noises to drown out or distract her from her own gasping, labored breath. It feels like she’s been running for miles, like she’s been running for _days_, cold sweat dripping from her hairline. There’s a roar in her ears that is probably her own heartbeat, and as it calms, she starts to become aware of other sounds—snoring at a distance, the crackle of logs in the little heat stove on the caravan, the gentle creak of wood flexing against wood in the wind.

Somewhere far away: the howl of a wolf.

She hisses under her breath as it all comes flooding back, pulls her knees to her chest and curls down over them because otherwise, she thinks she might throw up, or overbreathe, or start crying, and none of those are good in such cramped quarters.

The wolf’s eyes hang in her mind, accusing. She remembers the blood slicking its lower jaw, and she has no context but when she thinks about how that made her feel, in the dream, she chokes—and a few tears do break through, but at least she is not sobbing, is not raising a ruckus that will awaken the entire caravan. They’re the hot, lingering tears of loss, burning their way free, and she bites into the knuckle of her clenched fist, closes her eyes, rocks back and forth until the eyes fade and the grief fades and her body remembers where she is and where she isn’t.

She is in no forest. She is in no alley. There is nothing on her heels, and her feet are curled into the blankets beneath her, not beating frantically across the ground as her lungs burn and her muscles scream.

She lifts her head, takes a breath.

There are more howls, now. They’re far enough away that the camp has no reason to be concerned, but she wonders—is that all? Is that all the dream was? Her subconscious picking up on the howling and interpreting as best it could, in the slippery space between sleep and awareness?

She hasn’t been sleeping well, she knows this. On the road, she had been painfully alone; even now, the caravan is packed with people, but they all have their own person-sized space allocated for sleep. There is no one pressed against her on either side, no one’s breath in her hair or hand tucked into hers. And this isn’t the first night she’s woken well before dawn, woken full of a wired-up anxiety—forced herself to stare straight up, counting stars in the sky or the tiny embroidered circles on the swath of linen hanging over her bunk.

It could be that: the anxiety, the loneliness. It could be the howling. It could be just a bad dream, as people get, but it feels like something bigger than all of those things.

Something feels wrong.

* *

The dawn creeps in insidiously, sky going slate grey and then blue grey and then blue, faintly, as the first fingers of light crawl along the horizon. The early sunlight filters in through the curtains hung over the caravan’s windows for warmth, flutters across her face as the breeze lifts and drops the curtain, feels cold and miserable and like a knife to the eyes.

Sypha never got back to sleep, not really. She doesn’t bother to keep trying, now that the day’s getting started—just slides out of her bunk and bundles up in all the layers she has and slips out into the bitter cold. Her breath steams in front of her like smoke from a chimney, billowing up and away. This early, the world feels like it’s hewn from crystal, every blade of brown grass coated in frost that crunches under her sandals, the air itself cutting like glass.

The sky is a clear, brilliant blue, so different from the deep grey cloudiness of the past few days. A good sign, she thinks, for someone seeking clarity.

Sypha isn't quite sure where she's headed, just yet—she's moving just to try to keep warm, wandering the inner perimeter of the ring of caravans. The ground is piled with blankets and cushions, spotted with banked fire pits and cooking pots, all of it traced in sharp, deeply angled shadows. It's the third time she catches herself searching those shadows for movement, for a lupine form hugging low to the ground, ready to leap and bite and tear, that she realizes she hasn't quite left the dream behind.

"Ugh, stop it," she chides herself, shaking her head.

She keeps moving, keeps moving.

* *

This collection of caravans—the one she’s stopped in front of, watching the sun climb over it, painting all the blankets and curtains and decorations a pale orange-pink—could be any train, could be any tribe. There’s nothing about it that jumps out as special, nothing that sets it apart. The firepits are the same, with the same cast-iron pots and piles of cushions to accommodate storytelling, and the dog sleeping curled up close to the warmth of the embers looks neither magical nor like a spirit beast. It’s just a mutt, probably belongs to a child, and it seems content where it is.

Still, she knows: these are the Nasaii.

She knows because they’ve been here two days now, and she’s taken every opportunity she can to come by and try to beg or barter some time with their elder, but they have been in demand, and _busy_. Enchanting objects to bring fortune and health for the year to come. Interpreting dreams and visions. Creating amulets and potions capable of shifting reality to align with their intent in ways that most magicians cannot—though she wonders what they would think of her success in trapping Dracula’s castle, itself a reality-bending anomaly. 

And they’ve been recounting their own stories, over and over, to as many people as will hear them--the stories they’ve received from the future. The stories that will become prophecy.

She’s met them before—they travel a lot of the same routes as the Codrii, and that’s a big part of why her people had been so familiar with so many of those stories. Why they’d been so quick to believe the stories surrounding Gresit, why they’d latched onto Trevor the moment they’d realized he was the most quintessential hunter they’d ever find.

And they’d been right. About all of it. The three of them, their battle, their success, their lives together afterward, sharing themselves in ways that would be impossible with anyone who hadn’t lived through what they had. She’d had faith in the Nasaii’s abilities before, but now…

The creak of a door hinge. Sypha looks up from her contemplations.

It’s not the largest caravan, or the most important looking, but there’s no doubt in her mind that the kindly looking woman standing in the open doorway is the elder she’s been seeking. She’s just as bundled as Sypha is, but she smiles, beckons with a mitten-gloved hand, disappears back into the shadows inside.

Sypha swallows tightly, and follows.

* *

“You’ve been here a lot,” the elder chuckles, pouring them both some steeped chamomile; even with the heat stove going, it’s chilly in here. There are others scattered about, still sleeping, so they are keeping their voices low. “What can I offer, to one of the saviors of Wallachia?”

“You know who I am?”

“Of course.” She settles down on the floor across from Sypha; it smells herbal and comforting in here, and the rug beneath them is soft and worn. “There’s nothing magical about _that_. Sypha Belnades is a name becoming quite well known—you’re the one telling the story that bookends ours. The sleeping soldier, the defeat of Dracula. There’s a nice symmetry there, don’t you think?”

_More than you realize_, Sypha thinks; beginning with Alucard, ending with Dracula. Or the other way around. But it’s very possible that the woman _does_ realize it. 

“Yes,” she says instead, simply. “It’s a chapter of history that’s come to a close.”

“Has it?” the elder asks, a twinkling in her eye.

Sypha laughs, tries to keep it quiet. “If there’s more to tell then you’re going to have to tell _me_; that’s your talent.”

“Is it,” the woman echoes, this time less of a question, more of a challenge.

And, okay, that’s as clear an invitation as she’s going to get. “Elder. You asked what you could offer me,” she says, hesitant.

“I did.”

“I am a scholar of magic, as your people are—but there is only so much I can learn, within my own tribe. I need to go deeper, to learn more.” A breath, as she gathers her courage. “I want to learn to see—as you do. To see into the future and the past, to see things that are far away. My father could do this, and his mother before him, so I know I have the potential.”

A long, careful pause. The elder sips from her cup, keeps her eyes on Sypha the entire time, a subdued appraisal. 

“How old were you,” she asks, “when your father died?”

And it’s not a topic she’d been expecting, or she would have guarded her emotions more carefully; as it is, the question knocks the wind from her. “It… it was in my sixth summer,” she says, pushing through the disorientation, through the choking swell of loss. “But I was already using magic, by then—he’d taught me—”

The elder waves her hand, dismissive, though not unkind. “That is not the issue; I have no doubt you were coming into your abilities well before that time. I am wondering, though, how well you truly remember his capabilities.”

“...why?”

The elder takes a deep breath, lets it out, like she is preparing to deliver bad news, and she probably is. “Because the abilities you’re describing are not ones that we—or any Speaker magician, to my knowledge—possess.”

“But—your stories from the future—”

“My people are gifted with spontaneous visions—something any magician may receive, but for us, they are uncommonly frequent, and uncommonly detailed. But even we cannot cast our vision forward, or backward, or far afield, with any sort of precision—and certainly not whenever we wish to.”

That… that makes no sense. She is _certain_ that her father could do exactly that; he had known that they were coming for him, had known exact details, had gotten Sypha and her mother away safely and how could he have done that without—

“We are at the future’s whim,” the elder continues, her voice apologetic. “We accept what it shares with us—but we cannot sound its depths at our own will.”

“There’s truly no one—”

“No one among our people, no. I’m sure there are true black magicians out there—who don’t care how arrogant their acts are, or what sort of chaos and destruction they court—who can do what you’re describing. But I wouldn’t recommend seeking them out.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” Sypha says, automatic, her mind churning through this information because it still, _still_ makes no sense. 

He’d _known_—he’d gone looking for the knowledge that night, and had come out of it _knowing_, and when she was five Kitty had gone missing and he’d found her for Sypha without even leaving the caravan, and—

—and he’d never done any of this in front of anyone else, only Sypha and her mother and his own father, Sypha’s grandfather, who had been the one to tell her all the stories of her grandmother that she’d never met, and—

She needs to talk to him. Now.

It’s an urgency she’s never felt—it takes her breath away, makes her head hurt, because all at once she knows that he will have answers for her, even if they don’t lead her to the skills she’s seeking, even if they lead only to more questions. 

She knows.

* *

“Sypha? Is something wrong?”

It is, yes. Her frustration is boiling to a high heat; she’s checked the caravan, looked all around it and the rest of them that make up their train, has checked every cooking pot and storytelling blanket-pile within calling distance. Her grandfather isn’t _anywhere_, and that’s not even anything to worry about—he’s an elder, he must make his visits to the other trains, and there are probably people here in Enisala that _he_ hasn’t seen in ages either—but it is. Inconvenient. Frustrating. Almost enraging. There’s a heat in her that feels like her fire but it’s not concentrating at the ends of her fingers; it’s somewhere deep behind her ribs.

Still, she bites her tongue hard, looks to where Lily’s just come out of the next caravan, a colorful blanket not too different from Sypha’s scarf wrapped around her head and shoulders. It’s got the same lively abandon, the same vibrancy in defiance of any concept of pattern or style.

_Her mother makes them,_ she remembers, belatedly. _That’s why you fell in love with that scarf in the first place; it reminded you of her, of home._

Sypha takes a long, deep breath, closes her eyes for a moment. “No. I’m all right.”

A measured look then, deeply searching, and Sypha knows that she isn’t buying it.

“We have known each other so long, Sypha,” Lily says, stepping toward her, offering the edge of the blanket. “Do you think that just because things have changed, that I’ve forgotten everything I know of you?”

Sypha shakes her head, wordlessly accepts the drape of the blanket over her shoulder because she is afraid any word she says might come out caught on fire, and there is nothing gentle Lily deserves less. Her friend’s hand settles around her waist, steers her gently toward the pile of cushions on the ground nearby. 

“Tell me,” Lily says, once they’re settled, the expanse of the blanket still spanning them, catching and holding heat. 

_I’ve just been told that cherished memories from my childhood could not have happened,_ she thinks. _I’m depending on learning to foresee dangers to protect the loves of my life and apparently it cannot be done, _she thinks.

_My grandfather has some questions to answer, and he is not here, and there is no reason to assume that is on purpose but it still feels like it because, clearly, something is wrong with me._

“Do you remember my father?” Sypha asks, and even she does not know why this is the question she’s chosen.

Lily hesitates. “Only a bit. We were both young—I remember him almost as a shape or a shadow, just another adult. I remember thinking that his voice was kind, though I cannot remember it now.”

“I can’t either,” Sypha says, sighing. “They say that’s the first thing we lose.” She shakes her head; it feels like there’s something stuck, something she’s trying to shake free. “But do you remember him ever doing anything… odd? Magically, I mean. Magic that most people can’t do. Or… people talking about that?”

“I watched a few of your lessons,” she says. “You know that. A lot of us did. But I never saw anything unusual.”

“Hm.”

“Sypha, what’s going on?”

She takes a breath, huffs it out dramatically. “I don’t know. Just… some inconsistencies, between what I’ve been told and what I remember. That’s why I was looking for my grandfather—I was hoping he could make sense of it for me.”

A long pause; even with the sun fully up, it’s still bitterly cold, maybe even more so than other mornings because of the lack of clouds. Lily chafes her hands together under their drape of blanket, takes her time deciding how to respond.

When she does, it’s careful, slow. “Do you think that clarifying all of this will make your memories of your father better? Or easier to bear?”

A harsh laugh that she barely feels. “I have no idea.”

“Be careful,” Lily warns, watching her own fingers twisting together. “You cannot make any new memories with him, so it’s important not to taint the ones you have.”

It sounds, Sypha thinks, like words of experience. She searches her memory, can’t pin down anything she knows of Lily’s family that fits, but she has been away for a year and there are certainly things that she doesn’t know. 

Either way, she takes her friend’s hand, gives it a comforting squeeze; she leans in, letting their shoulders and heads rest together, and she thinks that the fire in her is, at least for the moment, tamped down to embers.

* *

She finds him, in the end, down by the stream. A number of her tribe had taken the early morning walk with him, to fill the canteens and wash out some of the clothes; they’ve since returned to camp, but he’s still sitting out on one of the large, flat rocks, cross-legged and still as peace itself.

“Sypha,” he says, all fondness, as she clambers onto the rock alongside him. At least the sun is strong out here in the open, warms through the fabric of her hood. 

“Grandfather,” she says in return, and for all that she had a million questions just ten minutes ago, she suddenly doesn’t know where to start. At the beginning, she supposes, but where does that fall? When she spoke to the elder this morning? When she was six and watched her father divine secrets no one should have been able to? Before she was born, when it was her grandmother defying all the rules instead?

He’s watching the water, with the sun running through it like gold, the glittering edges of ice perpetually forming and melting and reforming at the edges of the stream like crystalline fingers reaching out from the bank. It _is_ lovely. It makes her think of quieter, simpler times, when beauty was all any of them needed.

Things have changed, she has changed. But they’re always changing—every one of them.

When the moment feels right, she starts talking, telling him the things she’s learned, asking her questions. He doesn’t have many answers. What she remembers is true, of course. These are things her father could do, and he can vouch that her grandmother had been equally skilled, but as to the why, the how—he doesn’t know. Or he doesn’t want to tell her. She doesn’t want to think he’s being evasive, would never have thought that _before_. But it isn’t before.

“Walk back to the caravan with me,” he finally says, after their collective silence has gone on a touch too long for comfort, when it’s becoming clear that Sypha is not satisfied with what he’s given her. He unfolds himself from the stone with an ease that belies his age, offers her a hand up with a sad smile. “I will show you something.”

* *

Speakers don’t have much in the way of personal possessions; they live together, they share the resources that they come by. Greed is not simply forbidden—it’s just not in their blood or in their souls. It isn’t something they’re raised to foster. But that does not mean that objects cannot have sentimental value, that they do not hold onto tokens of experiences that have passed and people that are no longer here. 

Her grandfather is no exception—and when they get back to the caravan he opens the storage space tucked beneath one of the bunks, lifts free a little cloth satchel, no larger than a hand, dark grey and trimmed in green.

“This was your grandmother’s,” he says, smiling in that way of a widower that remembers grief but no longer lives in it unceasingly, for whom the good memories have come to supplant the pain. He upends the bag onto the bunk’s surface; only a few objects tumble free, silently land in the blankets. A petite, bent bronze ring. A bracelet braided from wool fibers dyed a dozen different colors, the ends frayed through as if it’d been worn until it snapped from wear. A smattering of feathers, from species she has never seen, in the sort of rich hues that just _feel_ exotic, tropical, foreign. 

And a stone. It’s as wide across as two fingers, violet or blue but so deep as to be nearly black, cut into a near-perfect sphere. The only imperfections are a pair of opposed dimples that look carved to fit fingertips.

Sypha picks it up, drawn to it almost magnetically. Looking more closely, it isn’t actually opaque—she can see _into_ it, see tiny silver specks that look like stars, sparse here, dense there, swirled into thick clouds and spirals. But no matter how deeply she looks, what feels like feet or miles of distance, she cannot see through to the other side.

“What is this?” she asks, voice hushed.

“_That_,” he says, “was also your grandmother’s, and your father’s after she passed.”

She holds it up to the sunlight; still, nothing makes it through. “But what is it?”

He laughs. “I do not have even the slightest idea, my angel.”

She winces, lowers the stone, looks down into it. She doesn’t even know why that name makes her stomach feel as if it’s full of butterflies and fire, makes her heart so heavy. 

“What I know,” he continues, “is that he did not want you to have it.”

Sypha feels her brow knit. That isn’t what she’d been expecting. Why would he have—if this is somehow connected to her questions today, to her heritage as a magician, why would he have wanted it kept from her?

In her fingers, the stone feels heavier than it should. “Why?” 

“You must know, from your time with Belmont and your soldier, that there are parts of an inheritance that are more burdensome than they are beneficial.”

She thinks about Trevor and the hold and the skeleton of his childhood home, about the scars that cover his body and the nightmares he still sometimes has, waking with the smell of smoke in his nose or the feeling of his own blood running out onto the ground. She thinks about Adrian and the parts of the castle he never goes to, about the enemies he has never met but still has to worry over, about the fact that he knows exactly what his own mother’s screams sound like and the way he has to speak so carefully in town, and never smile, never laugh, to avoid being forced to scream the same way. 

“Yes,” she says, “I do.”

“He did not want that for you. I can understand that, and I hope you can as well.”

“Then why are you showing it to me now?”

He hesitates, gathering the rest of the objects back into the satchel, pulling the cord closed. “I am not showing it to you, Sypha. I am giving it to you.”

“But—”

“There are worse things than being burdened by your heritage,” he says. He lifts the bunk lid with a creak, settles the pouch back inside with all of the other little boxes and satchels. “You are worried for your life, for the lives of those you love. I would be a terrible grandfather if I were to deny you something that could help you protect them. Especially if you are right to be worried.”

“I am,” she says, a rush of certainty running through her like the tingling heat of a nearby lightning strike. “Something is wrong. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling since this morning. But how do I…” She turns the stone in her hands; it isn’t warm, or glowing, or doing anything at all, really.

Another of those quiet noises that would almost be a laugh, were the topic not so dire. “I do not know. It was never explained to me. I know only that the stone was important to both of them—they were never without it. I can only guess that it is related.”

She cups it in her palm, stares down at it again, giving its impossible depths careful thought. No, it makes sense that he wouldn’t know—she’s used to him having all the answers, being all things to her, but he isn’t even a common magician, much less able to work with the kind of forces she’s talking about. Everyone has their limits.

The weight of the stone… it’s getting heavier, it feels like. Deeper. The silver specks don’t move, but it’s a little like the feel of Dracula’s engine in her grasp, as if it were spinning and the inside of it were spinning a different way, the entire thing fighting against her attempts to hold onto it.

In her mind: a fat full moon, a long night, the sun dying and rebirthing. A wolf’s eyes, icy and murderous in its glare. Blood that isn’t hers, and the certainty, living deep in her heart, that she’s fleeing its ferocity alone.

“I have to go back,” she says, quiet. “Something’s going to happen.”

_Something is always happening_. _Why is it different now?_

_It is, it _is_. Why doesn’t matter._

“It will take you a week, at least,” her grandfather says, not a drop of argument in his voice, and she has never been so grateful. “Will you be able to get there in time to help?”

“It _would_ take me a week,” she says, fist closing around the stone. “But a pigeon can travel faster than that, so a message can as well. And they can retrieve me from there.” 

She looks up, and no, he’s not arguing, but there is a sadness in his eyes. It will be the first solstice she has missed, and the dangers she walks into are unknown. “I’m sorry,” she says. “If I am wrong, then they can send me back—but if I am right and I stay here—”

“I said there were worse things than a burdensome heritage,” he says, reaching to run a hand through her hair, gently mussing it. “Regret is one that comes to mind. I’m sure there is a pigeon-keeper somewhere in the camp.”

* *

He’s right, of course. Many trains have their own messenger pigeons, infused with a vague tracking magic to let them home in on distant places; the Codrii have always been a bit small to manage it, but in the highest, sunniest spot on a bluff overlooking the rest of the camp, a young man—maybe seventeen or so—tends quietly to his flock, speaking to them in burbling whispers, stroking their feathers, giving them choice kernels of fresh grain and scraps of vegetables. It’s like an open-air aviary, no leashes or ties in sight.

They all have names, apparently. Sypha finds she likes this birdkeeper immediately.

“To the foothills?” he asks, a finger pressed to his chin, considering. “And urgent. Have to balance speed and endurance, then...ah!” He comes to a stop before the perch of one bird in particular, a piebald creature, sleek and well-groomed and calm. “Spots! Of course. She’ll be perfect for a journey like this. She is very reliable. Do you have your message? And something from the recipient, for her to follow?”

Sypha does; she's shaved a curl of leather from the sheath of the boot knife Trevor had insisted she take with her, and she’s written the message on parchment with the most weatherproof ink she could find, so that it will survive to its destination no matter what snow or cold winter rain finds it on the way.

As they watch the bird disappear into the western sky—the sun chasing it relentlessly, and it will circle back around a few times before her message makes it to Adrian and Trevor—she can only hope that this is enough, that she has enough warning, that she can get to them in time.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LOOK IT'S A BIRB :>
> 
> <s>I have no idea if messenger pigeons were a thing in Wallachia specifically though I am fairly sure they were common in Europe in the 1400s. It's a simple enough concept that I imagine wherever birds lived that could be taught to fly to certain places, the practice would have thrived.</s>
> 
> NEVER MIND THEY ARE MAGICAL PIGEONS NOW. 
> 
> Also: Sypha jumps into the deep end, without any idea of how far in she's going to get or how far down she can go and survive. No regrets.


	4. Chapter 4

*

That’s… odd.

Admittedly, Adrian hasn’t been to this particular corner of the hold before—between the multiple floors and all the shelving and stacks, there are hundreds of corners one could find themselves in, and he hasn’t been systematic about exploring all of them—but the sight before him still jumps out as unusual. It’s as if this particular set of stacks just _ends_, earlier than it should. The wall at the end looks, at first glance, like they do everywhere else in this place, but a quick look around to the rows on either side confirms that the wall should be further back than it is. There’s something taking up space that shouldn’t be there. 

A hidden compartment, like the broken-apart one Trevor had found the Morning Star hidden in? A secret room? A careless mistake of architecture? Maybe an unexpected deposit of some unbreakable mineral that they’d had to build around instead of dig through.

Adrian sets down the armload of healing potions he’s found—mostly for superficial wounds, but in a bad situation anything helps—and as he moves closer, he can see that there are faint white chalk marks around the edges of the wall, striated over the rough grain of the wood. They might have been letters, once upon a time. Might have been a ward, even—so, likely a secret space of some kind. But time has shaken the chalk loose, distorted and half-erased the symbols, so there’s nothing stopping Adrian when he reaches out to knock on the wall and, when only a hollowness reaches his ears, give it a solid shove.

It doesn’t move very far, but it flexes, like a panel in a frame. Designed to slide, maybe? He extends a few talons, digs them into the wood for a handhold, then pushes sideways. There’s a creak that sounds like rust over rust, seized up moving parts being forced to move again—and then the entire panel slides away into the bulk of the bookcase. 

It’s dark inside, predictably. He has good vision in the dark, but that still doesn’t help him make sense of what he’s seeing.

He shouts for Trevor, perhaps more urgently than necessary.

* *

By the time the hunter actually shows up, one hand on the hilt of his sword as if expecting to find a demon chewing on Adrian’s head, he’s moved a ways back into the darkness—not so far that Trevor won’t be able to see him, but enough to assess just how large the space really is. 

“What… what is that?” Trevor asks, squinting into the shadows. He can probably make out a lumpy shape, not much else. “This isn’t supposed to be—”

“Get a candle, or a torch,” Adrian says, setting one hand on his hip, looking contemplatively down at the mess in front of him.

Trevor disappears for a moment, comes back with a little lantern, the glow from it faintly blue. Magical fire? Probably. No matter.

“What the hell,” Trevor says, flat. He lifts the lantern further into the space.

On the walls, more cryptic runes, these more intact than the ones outside. On the floor, a pile of what looks like bedding—sheets and blankets thrown together in a roughly human-shaped pile, though there’s no occupant at the moment. There are a few empty bottles, like the ones that hold the healing potions Adrian had found, clinking together on the floor. A dagger, with no sheath. A torn, empty satchel of plain leather. 

“A cozy little nest,” Adrian muses aloud, stepping over to the blanket pile, crouching down.

“Wait,” Trevor says; Adrian turns back toward him, sees him silhouetted against the light from the hold, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Are you telling me we’ve got someone _living here_?”

Adrian reaches down, runs his fingers through the undisturbed dust coating the fabric. “Not for several months, at least—probably closer to a year.”

“Which is just around when we left it wide open for a few days, right.”

That… doesn’t entirely make sense, unless the person snuck in then and somehow snuck out again shortly after—and he’d gotten the new stone in place extremely quickly. Though rebuilding the stonework around it had taken some time; it’s _possible_—

“It smells of old blood, in here,” he says, thinking. “Perhaps if they were injured…”

But why here, in this remote corner? How would they even have known it was here, known how to get in? And why camp in a dark, miserable little cubby instead of in one of the comfortable chairs littering the reading rooms? His attentions had been limited to the entrance for months; it’s not like whoever it was had need to fear discovery.

And what sort of indigent, injured or not and hiding out from the spring rains in a derelict library, would have bothered with wards?

The dust layered on the floor around the bedding is a lot thicker, is decades thick, if not more.

“That must have been it,” he says, because none of this has to mean anything in particular. But he’ll stick with his initial impression: it’s odd.

* *

So: healing potions, and other tinctures that seem designed to help in combat, set aside in the castle where they won’t be likely to break, though Adrian’s unsure if any of them are even any good. He knows how long his mother’s medicines can sit on a shelf without spoiling, but he has no sense of whether magical solutions have an expiration date. 

“We’re going to need to watch the windows,” Trevor says, words punctuated by the scrffing noise of his boot knife working through a soft piece of pine branch. He’s settled on the steps here in the main hall, keeping his hands busy while they talk. “Wards get weaker over time, and some of those are pretty old. And there’s not enough wood in the whole forest to board them all up.”

This is not a new conversation. Trevor seems to make a nervous habit of running through information he already knows, reassuring himself that they’ve covered every eventuality, that they’re aware of all their weaknesses. Still, it’s time to add something new.

“I spoke with Isabel privately, before her group left,” Adrian says, eyeing the windows high up in the entry hall. “Not many of her people are fighters, but she’s agreed to send those that are to help us repel… whatever is coming.”

No response. When he glances back down, Trevor is staring up at him, unreadable.

“It’s a very generous offer,” Adrian elaborates, “Considering none of us has any idea what we’re getting into, here.”

And something in there must have been the last straw, because Trevor sets the knife and the half-started carving aside, very deliberately. Then he returns his attention to Adrian, and there’s displeasure on his face the likes of which Adrian hasn’t seen since the early times—those first few days in the hold maybe, when Adrian had been, he can admit now, behaving like an utter ass.

That’s not a great sign.

“‘Isabel’?” Trevor finally asks, incredulous and vicious. “Little familiar, there.”

“It’s… how she introduced herself.”

“So did I,” Trevor says, slinging his arms across his knees. “And it took you almost dying in a field before you called _me_ by my given name. But she’s _Isabel_.”

Adrian narrows his eyes. From someone else in a similar situation, this would sound like a lover’s petty jealousies coming to the fore, but immature as he can be sometimes, Trevor’s not that dense. Something else is going on here. “You and I, we… began badly. That set some habits.”

“And she was all sugar and spice?”

“Last I recall,” Adrian says, tone hardening along with what he can feel of his expression, “She did not immediately try to kill me, no.”

Trevor looks away then, huffing a frustrated breath out through his nose. That was, perhaps, too harsh a reminder, but it’s served to break Trevor’s momentum. That’s usually the best way to force him to get to the damn point. “I just think you’re being… _far_ too trusting of these people. And far too _cozy_.”

“You know exactly how much trust we should be giving them, then?” Irritation bleeds into his voice, and Adrian wonders, in a detached way, if this would be happening were Sypha here. “You’re the expert on vampire court politics?”

“No, I’m not,” Trevor says, damnably calm. “But you’re supposed to be, and even I can tell this is a mistake.”

“Here’s a surprise for you, then,” and he doesn’t want to admit this, can’t admit it, _has to_ admit it. More is on the line than his pride. “I do not. Know. What I’m doing, Trevor.”

A beat of silence, then, long and unwieldy. Trevor’s face goes through a few variations on disbelieving, frustrated, angry, and sympathetic.

“You grew up in Dracula’s fucking court,” he finally says, settling on disbelief. “How could you not—”

“Do you really think that’s the model I should be emulating? Constant demonstrations of power, of threats, ruling by fear?” Adrian looks down at Trevor again, and despite his frustration, despite the way he can feel his temper getting out of hand, he still doesn’t like it, doesn’t like looking _down_ at the man. He settles to the stairs nearby, graceless. “Did you know that my mother had to walk through a field of impaled skeletons, the first time she came to the castle? And despite what she believed at the time, they were _not all human._”

“Yeah, cry me a fucking river.”

“I’m not trying to garner sympathy from you on their behalf. I’m simply pointing out that the example my father’s court set for me—even if he had softened considerably in the years I was there to see it—is a legacy of terror, among the humans _and _his allies. And that is not what I want this to be.”

“For someone who doesn’t want to go down that path,” Trevor says, tilting his head back to regard the ceiling, far overhead. “You’re really toeing the line, lately.”

It isn’t even a loud statement, or said with any particular venom. It’s just there, and now that it’s there, it can’t be looked away from.

Adrian is—flabbergasted. That’s the only word for it. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, discarding one retort after another, because if Trevor really feels this way—really thinks he’s been edging in that direction—then this is suddenly no longer about winning an argument.

“What are you talking about?” he finally asks, quiet.

Trevor sighs. “When we got here,” he says, turning finally to actually face Adrian, “you were starved half to death because you were so determined to live as a human that you weren’t even feeding from animals. Which _also wasn’t good,_ okay?” He makes careful eye contact with Adrian at that, as if he is worried that point will get lost. 

Adrian nods, urging him to go on.

“But now suddenly we’re, we’re _pandering_ to these fucks,” Trevor continues, voice overflowing with frustration, “and taking what they tell us at face value, and you’re on a first name basis with them, and you’re flaunting your dragon around and acting like it’s just _fine_ that they’re probably still killing people—”

Ah. That’s got to be at least one part of the issue, except... “They told us that they don’t kill.”

“Did they?” Trevor asks, incredulous. “Did they actually say those words? Because I’ve been thinking about it, and I didn’t hear them say it—I heard them say that they _value human existence_. What does that even mean? Hell, I value the existence of chickens.”

“Not for their cultural contributions.”

“You know? If a chicken wrote a symphony, that’d be so weird I’d probably go see it,” Trevor says, and joking aside, Adrian doesn’t doubt it. He’d probably go laden with holy water, too, in case the chicken turned out to be possessed. “And maybe it’d even be good. And I wouldn’t eat _that_ chicken. But that wouldn’t stop me from eating the chickens that _don’t_ write symphonies. Because they’re _fucking chickens_, and one of them being some kind of brilliant freak chicken doesn’t mean the rest of them aren’t dumb as rocks.” He jabs his thumb into his own chest. “And _that_ is how they see _us_.”

Us—Sypha and him. And all the townspeople in Acasa, and all the other humans everywhere, a worldwide brotherhood that firmly excludes dhampir. It’s the only _us_ Trevor has ever cited that doesn’t include him, and it leaves him feeling raw.

And honestly, the desire to argue the point, to say that no, some vampires do value humanity for more than just food, is strong. But even Adrian has to admit that he’s never seen proof of it, aside from his own father, which is too ironic to be anything but painful—and inappropriate. It would be contrariness for its own sake, and he’s never been above that in a light spat before, but they’re in deeper waters now.

Instead, he asks: “Have _you_ ever killed a human, Trevor? Before this summer?”

“Yeah,” Trevor says, leaning back on his hands. No hesitation, but no pride either, and a hefty sigh. “Yeah, I have. In self-defense, mostly.”

“Mostly.”

“Some of the fights, you could argue I started,” Trevor clarifies, and that’s no surprise. “They didn’t need to happen. But I figured someone would get punched in the face at the end, not that there’d be someone trying to knife me.”

“Does it _surprise_ you that you’re capable of angering people to that point?”

Trevor shakes his head, laughs a little, pure self-deprecation. “It’s more just that I’m pretty terrible at reading a room past a certain number of ales.”

Another stretch of silence, as Adrian considers. He, personally, doesn’t have a human headcount at all—zero. But he knows that Trevor has had a much harder, more dangerous life than he has, the last two years notwithstanding. 

“I don’t have a choice,” is what he ends up saying, the verbal equivalent of throwing his hands up. “I’m doing this for you and Sypha—we had no allies. And we do need them.”

“Yeah?” Trevors asks, bland. “Why?”

Oh, for— “Because _something is coming for us._ You know that.”

“Actually, we don’t know _shit_. All we know is that someone’s been carving cryptic shit into trees that’s got us jumping at shadows like little kids and you know what? Maybe that’s what they _want_.”

Disorganization. Distraction. It’s occurred to Adrian—it’s possible. But. 

“We are not in a position to assume that,” he says, because they really, really are not. “We are not in a position of _strength_. I won’t pretend that we aren’t each forces to be reckoned with but there are only three of us—and right now, only you and me. And we _will be overwhelmed_.”

“Bullshit, you said the castle—”

“The castle is nearly impenetrable to _peasants with torches. _Against supernatural opponents, we will be overwhelmed, and Sypha will return here to find ruins, and us among them. Is that what you want?”

A moment’s pause, while that settles in. Trevor turns away from him, looks off to the side, and it’s likely no coincidence that were the walls of the castle not there, he’d be looking straight at the old estate. Was he able to dig out any of the bodies afterward? Or had they been so thoroughly turned to ash that there’d been nothing to find?

The hunter nods to himself, some private decision, then turns back to Adrian.

“What I _want_,” Trevor growls, “is for you to have the courage of your fucking convictions. It’s not all about who lives and whether we keep the castle and—I _told you_, the day we met.”

Adrian flashes back to that day, to a sharp, self-destructive grin in the face of death. _Are you saying that I’m a coward_, it’s on the tip of his tongue to say. But compared to Trevor’s courage that day, he probably _is._

“It’s about doing what’s right,” Trevor says, an echo of the memory. “And sometimes living through it’s a fucking luxury.”

Adrian glances up at Trevor again, meets expectant eyes, is startled by how grim the rest of his expression is.

And it seems there’s something too intense in his expression as well, because Trevor sighs, looks away. “You know me and Sypha,” he says, anger tempered. “You know we don’t want or need to be _protected_, and we sure as fuck don’t want it to be at the cost of your principles. We all have to dive into something awful together, if it means getting through it? Great. That’s what we’re doing. But don’t you _dare_ pretend,” and now the intensity is back, is infusing every syllable with a need to be understood, “that you’re being forced to do shit you don’t believe in because _we need you to protect us_.”

_I’m not doing it for you,_ says the part of Adrian’s conscience that knows his selfishness for what it is. _I’m doing it for me._

“Look,” Trevor says, taking his silence for an invitation to continue. “Back when we all met, with this pile of horseshit prophecy in front of us—I didn’t think any of us were going to survive that fight. And that would have been _fine_. If we accomplished what we set out to do? No complaints. You agreed with me, then.”

“I did.”

“So then why are you willing to put everything we fought for at risk, now? To keep us all alive? That wasn’t a valid tradeoff then, it shouldn’t be now.”

“I hadn’t yet _fallen in love with the both of you_, then.”

“That’s no fucking exc—”

“You don’t understand, Trevor.” And Adrian does not think he _will_ understand, either. “Vampires don’t fall in love like humans do.”

“You’re not—”

“Yes, yes, I know, I’m _not a vampire_. At this point I’m not sure who’s sake it’s for that you keep repeating that—mine, or your own tattered conscience?” Too mean—he knows it’s too mean the second it’s out of his mouth, doesn’t fail to notice the faint betrayal lacing Trevor’s expression, but as sometimes happens, he doesn’t seem able to stop. “I may not _be_ a vampire but I did inherit things from both of my parents, _as one does_. I cannot take this lightly. I cannot love without this… intensity.”

“You think I’m taking it lightly?”

“I think, like most humans, you love with a soul that knows itself to be temporary. You expect this to eventually end, one way or another.”

Trevor looks at him for a long moment, like he’s trying to decide whether to be hurt or to just dive into his protective cocoon of cynicism. Adrian wouldn’t honestly blame him for either choice.

“Everything ends,” he says eventually, a deceptively quiet middle ground. “That’s how this fucking place works.”

“And that’s the difference between us, Trevor. Your instinct is to accept that inevitability. My instinct is to expect forever, to hang on too tightly, no matter what I _know_ to the contrary.” 

“Then use what you _know_ instead of being led around by what you _feel!” _Trevor sounds exasperated nearly beyond words. “You’re fucking _smarter than this._”

“Am I.”

“Yeah, you _are_. And you know where these kinds of alliances are going to lead us.”

Adrian rubs his eyes. They’re back on this. “What exactly do you think is going to happen?” 

“What’s going—Okay, let’s do this.” Trevor gives up on his evasiveness, turns to face Adrian square in the eye. Sets both hands on Adrian’s knees, a bid to keep his attention locked in place. “What’s going to happen is,” he starts, like he’s explaining something painfully simple, “that first group that came to us? The ones who never categorically swore off killing? They’re going to start picking off folks in the town. Not for fun, not because they’re going on killing sprees, but one of them’s going to be hungry one day and they’re gonna say _fuck it_. Maybe it’ll be Maila that goes missing first, or that baker friend of yours, who knows. But it’s going to happen, because I’ve _seen it before_. And then you’re going to say, well, they’re not doing it very often, and we need the allies.”

Adrian pulls back, appalled. “I would never—”

Trevor holds fast, doesn’t let him retreat. “A year ago you wouldn’t have accepted anything short of ‘no, we won’t kill anyone, ever.’ That obviously changed.”

“A year ago I was asleep under Greşit.”

“You _know what I’m saying_,” Trevor says, frustration cresting, and okay, maybe this isn’t the best time to fuss over details. “Fine, look. I get that we need allies. I understand that we’re not fucking invincible. And _I understand that you don’t want to lose us_.” The grip on his knees tightens, doesn’t let go. “But we also don’t want to lose _you_, and that includes watching you become something you aren’t.”

_Don’t lose your _self_ in it_, he hears in his head suddenly, his mother’s voice, and he presses his eyes closed, rubs a hand across them. This. This is what she’d been—no, this is what _he’d_ been worried about. It was his dream, his own worries, and somehow he’d known that this would happen.

_Trust them, _he’d told himself, waking up that morning._ Trust them. Trust them. _

Inside, something cracks.

“You’re right,” he hears himself saying, before he’s really ready for it. “I’ve been lax in accepting allegiances without enforcing standards. And you’re right that that could lead down an unfortunate road. I’m not sure what to do about it.” He settles his hands on top of Trevor’s, feels the shakiness in them. 

“Do you have any suggestions?” he asks, voice barely a whisper. 

“How about this,” Trevor starts, with a victorious grin. “From now on, we all _discuss_ it, in _private_, before we sign up with anyone.”

Wait, he—he hasn’t been including them in those decisions? 

No, he realizes with a shock. He _hasn’t_ been. He’s been standing up there in the front while strange vampires call him _My Lord_, practically preening under the attention, and unilaterally granting them their requests. Good god, what kind of autocratic bastard has he been turning into, these last months?

One a lot like his father had probably started out as. 

“Absolutely,” he breathes. “That’s as it should have been to begin with.”

“And if the ones we’ve already accepted start killing people?”

“Then our acceptance of them is revoked. As are the protections that come with it.”

Trevor narrows his eyes. “I’m still not actually clear on that. What _exactly_ are we protecting them from?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Adrian asks, raising one delicate eyebrow. “What do vampires have to be afraid of, living in the shadow of the Belmont ruins? What could scare them so badly they seek to hide under the upstart halfbreed’s wing?”

“I didn’t think they were scared of much—”

“You, Trevor,” he says, and it’s clear from the shock on Trevor’s face that he never even considered it. “It’s always been you.”

* *

And because there are always some lingering irritations, even once they patch these things up—and he’s clearly reveling a bit in the realization that it’s his own reputation as a deadly and terrifying hunter that’s pushing all the local vampires onto their side—Trevor makes the executive decision that it’s time for _practice_.

So they go down to the weapons room they’d found in the depths of the castle, and they get out the dulled practice blades so that they can really cut loose, and they beat the metaphorical shit out of each other. And it feels good. It does. Cathartic. They’re exhausted, after—sweating and overheated and breathing too hard, and Trevor has to stop once on the climb up the stairs to push back on a wave of dizziness. It feels like every really good workout does.

But things still feel unsettled, uneasy.

Adrian bites back on his misgivings, sets a hand on Trevor’s back. For stability. For balance. Whose, it’s hard to say.

* *

They’re out of practical preparations to make, so Adrian digs around restlessly in the study, finds an old horologium behind a pile of books on a back shelf. It’s a work of art all on its own, all delicate gears and gold inlaid with some sort of blue stone, itself swirled with veins of silver and white. It takes some time but Adrian gets it running again, calibrates it, trying to get a more accurate read on the coming solstice. He knows it’s something he’ll feel in his bones, the itch of the night world crawling under his skin and lighting up his nerves, that wild impulse to get out under the moonlight and _run_. Hunt. Chase. Conquer. Crush flesh between your teeth and swallow down the blood mouthful by sweet, intoxicating mouthful. _Be what you are_.

To say that the solstice only lends creatures of the night_ metaphorical_ strength would be a gross understatement. But it also makes them sloppy, careless, slaves to instinct. Only the oldest—and those with the oldest bloodlines, in his case—can control it, can turn it to a true advantage.

But it’s still a frightening time, and with so much on the line, he wants a little warning.

“Two days,” he says after running the numbers, to no one in particular. He pushes away the calculations, slumps back into the chair. “Two days, and this could all be over.”

The tension is getting to him, is getting under his defenses. There’s no reason to assume that he, personally, is in any danger. He’s stronger by far than most of the vampires left in the world. Even facing great numbers, he will likely survive. But if he survives alone…

_Don’t get each other killed while I’m gone,_ says Sypha in his head.

_Everything ends,_ says Trevor.

He clenches his fist, releases it. He isn’t ready for this to end.

* *

Adrian walks away from the clock, from the figures, from the strategy and plans and precautions—wanders a bit, aimless, up and down corridors, through rooms he hasn’t been in in a decade or more. He finds Trevor purely by accident, staring morosely out a hall window as the snow billows down—pins him against the glass with a searching, questioning kiss, pulling the hunter’s lip between his teeth until the faintest tang of his blood filters into Adrian’s senses. Just a taste. Just fuel for memory. 

_We might lose each other, might lose Sypha too—after everything,_ he thinks.

“I’m sorry,” is all he manages—for the argument, for being enough of an ass that the argument had been necessary. For not being able to say any of the rest.

_I can’t think about it, can’t even touch it. It’s too much._

Trevor just shakes his head, dismissive. Framing his face, the white outside blows past in a turbulent blast of wind. “It’s fine.”

_Help me—help me forget._

So Adrian kisses him again, murmurs, “Yes?” against his mouth, gets a solid nod in reply.

* *

In the midst of all of this uncertainty, it’s familiar and comforting to just sprawl back on their bed and pull Trevor’s satisfying weight down to straddle his hips, even more so to listen to him hiss and moan as Adrian rocks up into him, all solidity and shivering heat. It’s not just the heat of any mortal, but a unique kind of vitality that only some of them possess, blistering like the sun. Trevor hadn’t had it when they’d first met; he hadn’t had it even when he was fighting for his life, down in the vault. Adrian had watched it settle into him as they’d risen to the surface on Sypha’s platform of ice: not just a determination to fight, but a willingness to _live_—or die trying.

It is, sometimes, too bright for his eyes to bear.

Trevor chokes out his climax with Adrian still inside him, with his own cock in his hand like it’s the hilt of a sword—and looking up at him, _watching_ him, Adrian feels eviscerated, like Trevor really did gut him under Gresit, left him to die in his lonely hiding place, stain the carpets with all that immortal blood and disappear into himself until nothing, nothing at all, remains.

* *

And of course, he comes back to himself—like he always does. No mortal wounds, no lonely underground death—just a grinning, glassy-eyed hunter, and through the window, snow that falls and keeps falling. Back to the present, to the present situation, always, for better or for worse.

* *

“When are we going to bring Sypha back?” Trevor asks, matter of fact, like it’s a foregone conclusion.

And… well, it kind of is. Adrian can make vague motions about them facing this down alone, but they both know damn well: they need her. More so than any of the reinforcements his overeager alliances will bring, they need _Sypha._

He rolls onto his side, regards Trevor for a moment before answering: sleepy-eyed, dramatically flushed, hair sweat-sticky against his face, breathing hard. Still coming down. Completely gorgeous. Adrian wants him _again_, fiercely, immediately; he can probably get hard again already, a gift of his bloodline, and even if not, he can always suck and finger the beautiful bastard until he forgets his own name.

An eyebrow lifts over one of those too-dark eyes, and Adrian knows—and he knows that Trevor knows too—that that’s the proximity of the solstice getting to him. Because. Sypha. They’re talking about Sypha.

They’re talking about Sypha, and it’s_ important_. More important than thinking up creative new ways to wreck his bedmate.

“Tomorrow night,” he breathes, through the red haze of heat crowding out his senses, trying to keep himself grounded. He has control over this, he always has. Just a situational lapse, nothing more. “If it looks like we’re truly in danger.”

“That could be too late.”

“I know. But we need to give her as much time as we can. And we should be able to get to her quickly, if we need to.”

Trevor considers this, staring up into the ceiling. With the snow outside, the entire world is hushed, even inside the castle. Unnaturally still, almost lifeless.

“I hope you’re right,” Trevor says finally, rolling over, burying his face in an armful of blanket.

*

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I know it seems like the Sypha chapters are all SERIOUS SERIOUS DESTINY HERITAGE MYSTICAL CRAP and the castle chapters are like HEY THINGS ARE TERRIBLE SO LET'S CUDDLE AND ARGUE AND FUCK but the thing is, Trevor and Adrian already HAVE their family baggage, their messed-up inheritances. Sypha, in the tradition of female thirds of epic trios everywhere, needs hers custom built. :( 
> 
> Fun fact: I was going to get to the big 'what the fuck is happening on the solstice' thing with this chapter, then the boys decided to spend ~2/3 of it arguing. Because. Of course they did.
> 
> Also, hm, weird shit going on with Adrian as they get closer to the aforementioned solstice. Hopefully he can keep his shit together!


	5. Chapter 5

*

The stone is smooth between her fingers, dark and cool and heavy, the starry expanse contained in its depths as inescapable as the spangled darkness spread overhead. The winter sky is the clearest sky, cold brightening the stars and blackening the spaces between, and from her perch here on top of the caravan, Sypha figures she could just about see forever, up there.

Cloudless. Bright. The eve of the solstice. Tomorrow, the shortest day, and then the night that follows…

She rolls the stone against her palm, wills her questions into it, wills it to answer. It remains maddeningly silent. 

A wolf. Cold, icy blue eyes. A chase, a swell of grief. Tomorrow? Or some time in the further future? _The wolves are circling, _she remembers from the woods, that night months ago—archaic French, a warning in a vampire's hand. 

The timing of her vision. Her father's impossible talents. That spiny, blue-eyed beast Trevor had gotten torn up fighting in Acasă, that had seemed almost _designed_, and Adrian had locked up the forges just about the first day after Dracula died but they never saw any sign of the men themselves, did they? 

Acasă. Enisala. Braila. Desperate days spent in a dank cell, waiting for Carmilla to figure out who they were, the thought of her still sparking more than simple fear. Larger than life, a figure of nightmares, and then, impossibly: she was gone, undone, just like that.

None of it makes any sense, when she tries to cram it together. That's why Sypha's up here, away from everyone, away from the warmth of the fire—she's seeking clarity, and there's something about cold that sharpens the mind, focuses the attention. Her logical mind cannot make sense of these pieces, how they fit together, and she's had no more dreams to help out, no visions. But there is something tugging at her subconscious, a feeling that it could all be _made_ to make sense, if only she could find the missing fragment, the keystone. She can see the shape of it in her mind, the hole where the last piece should fit—it looks like a spray of flower petals or blood, smells like cold steel and old books, feels like sadness—but she cannot fill it. 

It’s been four days since her missive went out, since she watched the creature carrying it take flight. She knows that it took her a week to walk the same distance—it should have arrived at its destination by now. They should have found her with the mirror, opened the way, brought her home. 

The pigeon might not have made it. It might have fallen prey to the cold, or a storm, or the jaws of a wolf or a wildcat, hunger winnowing a predator’s choices down to whatever is opportune. It might have just been _delayed_ by poor weather, might still be on its way, spending this cold night sheltered under the eaves of a barn outside of Acasă.

Or it might have arrived—and found its destination empty and cold and in ruins.

The stone feels heavier when she indulges thoughts like these, feels more full of whatever it is it carries. It wants her to think about it, wants her to consider destruction, devastation, the worst case scenario. She doesn’t know if it’s just the nature of the thing, or if that’s truly what the future holds and it’s balking against her stubborn refusal to hear it.

One more sunrise, one more sunset. 

They’ll be okay. They’ll bring her home and she’ll maybe have to pull their asses out of the fire but _they’ll be okay_. There is no other way this thing can end.

Shivering hard, Sypha closes her fist around the stone and swings herself down over the edge of the caravan, quietly eases the door open, slips inside.

* *

The winter solstice of 1476 dawns late, as it does every year—but only in the strictest sense. There is no sunrise to speak of, and the weather is dour and grey, the cloud ceiling low. The snowfall has ceased, at least, but just breathing the air outside feels like sucking down ice crystals; the temperature dropped precipitously overnight, and Adrian doesn’t make enough heat on his own to warm the air on its way in. 

Hours on now, well into afternoon, and the wind is picking up, a gusty system rolling in from the north. Overhead, the clouds roil.

To say the day had broken ominously would be an understatement, and understatement has never been in Adrian’s nature even at the calmest of times—right now, as tense as they are and with the inevitable approach of nightfall rattling the blood in his veins in ways he isn’t used to? It’s fair to say that it feels like goddamned doomsday, out here.

“Wow,” Trevor says, coming out onto the balcony behind him, two fistfulls of cloak crossed over his chest. His heartbeat is like a kettledrum, pounding in Adrian’s ears; it’s hard to hear what he’s actually saying. “This is the most miserable sky I’ve ever seen.”

“Have you been to the north, at all?” Adrian does his best to play casual, keep the quaver out of his voice. “Scandinavia and the like?”

Trevor laughs. “In the winter? Do I look like that much of a glutton for punishment?”

That conjures thoughts that are definitely not helpful—and Trevor really does make these things too easy. “...should I actually answer that?”

“God no,” Trevor says, quickly; it’s hard to tell if his face is red from the shame or the cold. “Never know who might be listening, out here.”

“I don’t think your ever-so-slight proclivity for pain is the secret we actually need to worry about guarding,” Adrian teases, beating the attendant mental images down hard. He pulls his own coat closed against a sharp gust of wind. “In any event. In northern Scandinavia, at this time of year? The sun doesn’t rise at all.”

Trevor steps up to the edge of the balcony, shoulder touching Adrian’s, the contact sending a shock of heat through him. “I’d heard that,” Trevor says, and that makes sense; sunrise patterns would be important in his family’s work. “We never hunted that far north, though, so I was never sure if it was just a bunch of bullshit or not.”

Adrian laughs, to cover the swell of affection. “No, it’s definitely true. The earth sits on a tilted axis, and…” he trails off, eyeing the distant clouds. There’s an energy gathering in them, a quietly mounting tension not unlike the approach of lightning, but the season is all wrong for that.

An animal scream, from the woods. A murder of crows explodes up from a huge, gnarled old tree over on the edge of the Belmont grounds, wing their way gracefully if noisily toward some undefined point on the horizon.

The wind dies, and it’s suddenly far too still, too tense, the air full of potential, all his senses wired up to respond to the first drop of blood that hits the ground—waiting, waiting. Expectant. _Anticipating._

“Never mind,” he says, shaking his head in an attempt to clear it. “It’s true, but I can explain why later. Just be grateful we still have the sun on our side here—as lackluster as it is today.”

“No shit,” Trevor grumbles, low. “They could just attack _now_ if they wanted. I don’t think there’s enough sunlight in Wallachia in a year to melt off those clouds.”

A suggestion of motion, off by the edge of the forest. Person-sized? Hard to tell; no frame of reference. The motion itself is alluring, makes him want to investigate, to give chase. The distance is deceptive. With these winds, their voices could be carrying frightfully far.

“Don’t give them ideas,” Adrian says, dour. No sane vampire would take that chance, not without good reason, but most of them are far from sane right now.

They have a few moments of respite, falling into a comfortable, companionable silence.

Then that motion again, just a flicker—a figure emerges from the treeline, and another, and another. He feels Trevor tense up next to him. 

“That’s bold,” Trevor murmurs. “Not even trying to be sneaky.”

“_If_ they’re an invasion party,” Adrian agrees. Bold, yes. Suicidally stupid. They’re coming out of the woods single-file, some of them in hooded cloaks and silent as the breeze, some of them exposed and clumsier. Almost as if…

“Huh,” Trevor says, narrowing his eyes. “Are there humans in that group?”

Adrian leans forward a bit over the balcony, watches the group reform into a knotted cluster, now that they’re in open space. Twenty at most. Possibly as few as sixteen. The wind shifts, carries the distinct smell of humanity up to him, the earthy, blood-tinged smell of _prey_. He quells a shudder, nods. “Good catch. That’s either our reinforcements, or our enemy is more desperate for forces than we realized.”

“My money’s on reinforcements. Look at the grouping—that’s not any kind of attack formation,” Trevor says, tone musing. “They’d be completely vulnerable to us just splitting them up the middle.”

They would—there aren’t enough of them to survive being split into smaller groups, not with experienced fighters standing against them and the night not yet truly begun. But vampires aren’t very strategic at the best of times; it’s a mistake they could easily make, right now. Adrian finds himself staring intently down at the group as it approaches, calculating vulnerabilities, weak spots. Considering how to take out the weakest links first. All of a sudden a fight sounds like a wonderful idea—he thinks he might be smiling, can feel his breath coming harder.

“Do you see anyone you recognize?” Trevor asks, snapping him back to the present, to reality. There’s a cautious note in his voice; something is making him nervous.

Adrian closes his eyes, opens them. These are likely their allies, not their enemies. He focuses in on the leader, scours for what details he can gather at this distance: female, green and gold cloak like the one Isabel had worn when they’d met at the castle, but this one with a hood, which fits for a vampire on a desperately cloudy day. It all lines up. “...yes. I believe so,” he says, turning to look Trevor in the face, and there it is—a little twitch around his eyes that would have been a full-body jump in anyone else.

So, correction: _He_ is making Trevor nervous. There is a perverse part of him, one he immediately despises, that finds the notion thrilling.

A loaded moment passes in silence.

“Well, that’s my cue I guess.” Trevor says, breaking it, pushing away from the balcony and heading toward the inner chamber. “...right. I’ll just—”

“Take no chances,” Adrian says, to Trevor’s retreating back. “And make sure they’re here because they want to be. The humans, I mean.”

A grunt of assent, and then Trevor disappears into the castle’s interior. 

Adrian folds his arms on the stone balcony, sets his forehead into them. Groans low and long, pure frustration. He should be better than this. He _is_ better than this. He has not felt this disoriented by the pull of this night since he was a child; it’s something he had thought himself grown out of. If his father had taught him anything—and he’d taught him quite a bit—it was _control_: control over impulse, over instinct, over the kinds of urges that promise immediate, incredible gratification but would, long-term, bring nothing but regret.

The air around him still smells like Trevor, like oiled leather and clean sweat and rich, love-spiked blood. His shoulder still burns from the few moments’ contact. When he tries to redirect his thoughts, they land not on the reality of defenses and danger, but on the thought that he might have Sypha in his arms again tonight--on the imagined feel of her body against his, small and taut and fierce, rippling with fire. On the smell of her skin, the taste of her mouth, the taste of _her_—and he lets his head slip past his arms to thud on the stone ledge between them, because this is _not the time_.

If all things were equal from a strategic standpoint, it would be best if he stayed far away from both of them, tonight. But all things are not equal, and splitting up would be tantamount to suicide.

Below, the mechanical groan and creak of the castle’s doors beginning to make their ponderous way open. The group from the forest is nearly in speaking range.

All right. For now, he will just stay here, he thinks; he can watch the entire interaction from this ledge, can be down to the ground in a second or less if any of the strangers try to pull anything, try to hurt Trevor in any way—

No. Trevor can take care of himself. He doesn’t need protecting, no matter that Adrian’s drive to shield him from any and all danger is overpowering right now, is flooding out all his more logical impulses. Trevor can handle himself and he is due that respect.

But as Adrian well knows, humans can only take care of themselves until they_ can’t_. Vampires, too; this isn’t an issue of species pride or ego. Anyone can make a mistake.

And he will be here, watching.

* *

Trevor goes ahead and trips the mechanism to throw the main doors open, heads down the outer staircase two steps at a time. Under the fur-lined cloak, he's wearing his own gear, not that poncey jacket; this is his show today, and they will respect him as a Belmont or not at all. Can they trust these people, he’d asked—and if they survive the night, then he’ll have his answer.

Assuming the only danger tonight comes from outside. Assuming Adrian doesn’t—no. Trevor shakes his head, dismisses it.

The contingent approaches, and his instincts on the balcony were right: about half the group appear to be decently armed and armored humans, breath puffing visibly in the cold, leathers up to their chins. They’re mostly carrying swords, but there’s an axe and a few crossbows in there, too. The leader has something swinging from her gloved hand, heavy and wet, and it genuinely takes a moment for Trevor to identify it as a messily severed head—hair twined into her grip, fangy mouth hanging open in a silent scream. 

The leader—Isabel, probably—tosses it into the snow between them, once they’re close enough to speak. She tips her head. “Belmont.”

"You know," Trevor says, eyeing the offering but not _really_ taking his eyes off the vampires. "My sister's cat used to bring dead things home, too. This some kind of fucked up gift?"

“A mob in the forest,” Isabel says plainly, a twist of a Spanish accent in her voice, “waiting for nightfall.” He can’t really see her face, under the hood, but people put too much emphasis on that, not enough on body language. She’s not standing like a liar. “We routed them from their hiding places, but they knew the forest better than we did and were able to escape. But,” she says, nudging the head with the toe of her boot, as if she means to roll it toward Trevor. “They no longer have a leader.”

“At least we know we’re not just jumping at shadows, now,” Trevor grumbles, crouching down to inspect the remains, one hand wrapped warningly around the hilt of his sword while the other turns the head onto its side. Under the crusted frost caked onto the skin, there are no tattoos, no jewelry, no distinctive marks; bastard didn't even have the good decency to write his own name on his forehead. “The rest of him somewhere?” Trevor asks, thoughtful; he’ll thank them in a minute, but if there’s a lead on who or what is _behind_ all of this—

“They took the rest of the body. I don’t honestly know why," Isabel says, tone faintly amused. "Perhaps they’re planning to eat it.”

That was a joke, whether he can see that she’s smiling or not, and Trevor laughs before he can catch himself—finds himself warily, carefully beginning to like this one. A bit. Enough to keep talking to her, at least. He stands back up, leaves the head where it is; maybe it’ll unnerve their attackers, when they pass this way. “That bad, huh?”

She shakes her head, frustrated. “No better than animals. They’re young, and they indulge their hungers freely. Neither of those things help, tonight.”

_Indulge their hungers_, _huh?_ Interesting, that that plays into this, and the images it conjures make his neck itch—but he puts it aside, for the moment. “While we’re on that topic. What do we have to work with, here?” 

“We’re not fighters,” she says, and damn but she could have fooled him. She’s about as fierce as pacifists come. “We have no soldiers to offer to Lord Alucard’s service. But we’re no strangers to defending ourselves, even under these... conditions. Which I know is the crux of your question.”

“Generally not a great night to have you people around, no.”

She inclines her head, huffs a laugh. “Does a Belmont actually suggest that there _is_ a good night to have us around?”

“Maybe during the hippogryph migration,” Trevor counters, flashing what he knows to be an irritatingly smug grin. “Seem like you’d be good at pest control.”

A pause, then a shine of teeth visible under the hood that he can tell is either a snarl or a smirk. “I see now why he keeps you around,” she says. “You’re fearless.”

Trevor narrows his eyes. This is a fiddly game she’s choosing to play, all posturing and perceptions of power, and he needs to be careful to neither underplay nor overplay his hand. “I’m a Belmont,” he says, aiming for pride just shy of arrogance. “I’ve killed more vampires than you’ve ever met, and I’ve been doing it since I was twelve. So this group of yours backstabbing us? It’d be inconvenient. But I’m not losing sleep over it.”

It isn’t strictly true. It’s going to be enough of a hell night as it is; damned if he’s going to let these fucks make it worse by crawling inside his sphere of trust and then going bloodthirsty as soon as the sun goes down. But this isn’t about honesty, not right now.

“Noted,” is her only response, though her voice has an edge of respect, now. Good. “The vampires among us are all either elders of the clan or come from old, stable bloodlines—they’re in control of themselves. And the halfblood will be no trouble, of course.”

_Halfblood?_ Trevor’s attention sharpens at that; they brought a dhampir? Hell, another dhampir even _exists?_ He scans the faces in the group, anyone not wearing a hood, looking for that inhuman shine he’s so used to, that glimmer of _otherness_ that he could never describe or explain but nevertheless knows when he sees it.

There. A young woman in fighter’s leathers, taller than Sypha, brown hair cropped close, eyes a touch too luminous to be called hazel. She’s making a valiant effort to be nondescript, a plain shortsword on her hip and a calm, reserved demeanor that somehow fails to fully meld with the nerve-riddled silence of the humans around her.

“You,” Trevor says, nodding in her direction. He can hear the vague sense of wonder in his voice; to read the old Bestiary, he’d thought his family had wiped them all out in the cradle. He isn’t used to being _grateful _that the Belmonts of old failed at something. “You’re a dhampir.” _You’re a child of two worlds; you’re like _him_._

“Good eye, Belmont,” Isabel says, approving. “Jeanne?”

The young woman nods her own head in acknowledgement. “A pleasure to serve,” she says, a glint of fang showing as she speaks--and oh, Alucard’s going to want to have a word with her later. If they both survive.

And Trevor really, deeply hopes this one survives; there are few enough of them left in the world. He glances up to where he knows Alucard is watching and listening from the balcony above, can feel the intensity of his gaze from here. 

Which reminds him. “What about the humans? You all want to be here?” Trevor turns back to them, addresses them directly, watching for any antsy tells. For all their obvious nerves—which he expects, in the circumstances—all he gets are nods all around. Infusing command into his presence, he asks again: “Anyone who’s been enthralled into being here against their will, raise your hand _now_.”

Common wisdom would have him believe that this is a fruitless exercise; you can’t just ask an enthrallee if they’re enthralled. But real glamours—the kind that bind their subject to their master’s will alone, make betrayal a physical impossibility—they’re _expensive._ They require a lot of energy, a lot of magic, a lot of pricey materials, and this doesn’t strike him as a group with resources to spare. The quick and dirty way, the one that most humans don’t know about, isn’t much more than simple hypnotism. All it does is compel the victim to respond to any authoritative enough command, from _anyone_, with obedience. 

Trevor can be plenty authoritative, when he wants to be. 

Not a single hand goes up.

“Good,” he says, turning back toward the castle. He’s already done a headcount: seven vampires, nine humans, one dhampir. He runs strategies in his head, as well as probabilities of certain types of attacks, given what he knows of their enemy. Which… isn’t much. There’s a mob of uncoordinated vampires involved, leaderless, with who knows what motivations. They’ll be sloppy and direct, rely on their enhanced speed and strength tonight.

“Okay. I want four people with ranged capabilities on the entry here—two on each side, as concealed as possible while still being able to cover the door. There are service entrances here and there around the perimeter, so we need a runner at each one, to alert the rest of us if we’re getting anything other than a blind, stupid frontal assault—which I _doubt_—so we can relocate defenses. Probably want about six people inside, guarding the entry hall and the main stairs heading further up. _No vampires in the castle_.”

“You don’t trust us, yes,” Isabel interrupts, matter-of-fact. “You’ve made that clear.”

“No, I don’t,” he says, because he’s not going to play coy diplomatic games. “But that’s not the issue. Do you know what plumbing is?” he asks, dropping his voice close to a whisper. This is not something he wants the wind to carry away.

She shakes her head in the negative. 

“Yeah, neither did I. But there’s pipes all through the castle that pump water around,” he says, gesturing vaguely above his head, “and we’ve spiked the supply with holy water. If we have to blow it wide open, we will, and any vampire that’s in there is going to melt, no matter what side they’re on. Fair enough?”

Her head crooks to one side, face still obscured by the hood. “I underestimated you, Belmont. Based on our conversation to this point, I expected you to be motivated solely by prejudice and hostility.”

“I did mention that I don’t trust you, right?”

“Yet here you are,” she continues, “concerned for our well-being.”

He isn’t sure if it’s sarcasm or deadpan sincerity, but he doesn’t have the energy to argue about it. “Yeah, well, I don’t like losing people on my watch,” he says, then pauses, a little surprised by his own honesty. He scrambles to reel it back in: “And allies are more useful when they’re not steaming puddles of liquefied flesh. That’s it.”

“Of course,” she says, infuriatingly knowing, and fuck, it’s _not_ just Alucard who’s a smug arsehole. It is, apparently, a species trait. “I’ll talk with my people, decide who should go where.”

And that should be that—there’s enough time for him to check on distribution of forces later, make sure they’re not doing anything stupid. But there’s something that’s been nagging him, has been since their first meeting in the castle—has been prodding him with guilty old memories and stoking his antagonism toward Adrian, toward them, toward their mysterious tree letter-writer, toward everything. And that’s not a good way to go into battle.

“One more thing,” he says, words slipping out before he can lose his nerve. “Why are you here?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You barely know us,” he says, “and you came here pretty sure that I was out to get you as much as any attackers. Your people could die here tonight. So: why are you here?”

Isabel takes a moment to consider her answer. Before she speaks, she reaches up, pulls the hood back just enough that he can actually look her in the face—under this cloud cover, she should be fine for a few minutes at least. She’s as collected and determined as he remembers, a dignified sort of elegance, dark skin flawless, deep burgundy eyes focused on him like she’s analyzing every breath and every blink, and maybe she is.

There’s a faint rim of brighter red, around the wine-colored irises. Adrian’s have had something like that too, ever since they woke up this morning. It’s not reassuring.

“We have travelled very far and very long to get here,” she says, repeating what she told them that first night. “It was not a safe journey. We lost people on the way—to hunters, but also to the intolerance of our own kind. Understand: evil is a choice. But it’s a choice our people make with sickening frequency.” She takes a steadying breath, something Trevor’s never actually seen a full-blooded vampire do, and looks up at the castle. “We kept coming because we hoped we could find a leader we could believe in. Should we now let his court fall, mere days after our journey’s end?”

“Word’s really travelled that far?”

“Oh, yes, Belmont. The golden dragon, risen from the ashes of his father’s court? Who keeps untamable humans as pets, and allies himself with the human world? There’s little else anyone talks about.”

Trevor finds himself smirking, feels like maybe he should be insulted but all he can think is what a wonderful thing it is, in battle, to be underestimated. “You think we’re pets.”

“No. I know the difference between a general and a guard dog when I see it. But the others do. More importantly, they see Lord Alucard as a presumptuous, disobedient halfblood that should be put in his place.”

“You mean _killed_.”

“Yes,” she says, unflinching. “And if that happens… nothing will ever change, will it?”

Trevor sighs, looks out to the cloudy, obfuscated horizon. He can still feel Alucard’s watchful eye on all of them, too intense, too much the stare of a wolf on prey, and he remembers talking about this with him, down in the ashy, ghostly Belmont ruins. Breaking the cycle. Preventing these tragedies from coming around again. 

If vampires are capable of not choosing evil; if hunters are capable of seeing them as people who have that choice; if both can stop seeing each other as prey for five goddamned minutes...

“No,” he agrees, quiet. “Without him? I don’t think anything will.”

* *

Trevor takes some time to walk the grounds, spare boots going soggy in the snow, getting a feel for the place. It’s something he’s done countless times leading up to this, but a landscape can be mutable, can bend to the will of weather and time of day and other, less definable things. Energy. Hostility. Intent. He stays away from the woods; there’s no point walking into an ambush and making things easy for them.

Somewhere out on the far side of the ruins, he catches a smell of spice and woodsmoke that makes him think of the marketplace in the town below. If the wind is coming from there, and is moving briskly enough to carry odors the entire way, that puts them all decidedly upwind of the forest. Which means that their forces—number, composition—are no secret to any creature in those woods.

Trevor sighs. The weather is what it is; not every disadvantage can be mitigated.

On his way back, he cuts along the western edge of the castle, raising a hand in greeting to the first of the service entrance guards—a human man, middle-aged and Mediterranean, with a surprisingly easy smile and a steady hand on the sword he’s sharpening. 

“You never really introduced yourself,” the man says, as Trevor approaches. “What should we call you?”

“Just Belmont is fine. I’m the only one left to respond to it. That a Damascus blade?”

“It is.” He turns the blade against what little light finds them; the watery rippling in the steel is deadly and gorgeous. “It was my father’s—he was a royal guard. His father’s before him. Not sure where it originally came from. The east, obviously.” He sets the whetstone down on his leg, offers his hand. “Luca Gregori.”

Trevor takes it, considers. “How’s the son of a royal guard end up travelling with a bunch of vampires?”

It’s a question that could be tossed right back in his face: how’s a Belmont end up living with the son of Dracula? But instead, Gregori only laughs. “By falling in love with the beautiful Romani maiden always playing music below my balcony at night, and not realizing until it was too late that there was a _reason_ she was only ever there at night.”

“Too late because she glamoured you?”

“Too late because I was too in love to see straight,” the man corrects, laughter in his eyes.

“Hm. She still with your group?”

If he’s thrown by Trevor’s casual acceptance of his answer, he doesn’t show it. “Of course. She doesn’t like fighting, though—she didn’t want to come. Didn’t want me to come either.”

“Why did you?”

“That question again. Did our leader’s answer not suffice?” He picks the whetstone back up, draws it along the blade in long, light passes. He knows what he’s doing. “Your Lord Alucard could be the key to finally changing things. And that’s the only way people like Mireli and I can ever live in peace. That’s worth fighting for—for her. We take care of each other,” he says, tilting his face to glance pointedly at where Trevor’s collar is drooping. “I can tell you know all about that.”

Trevor feels heat threaten to rise up his cheeks, smacks it down hard. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, here. This man for damn sure feeds his own love—but there are appearances to maintain, for the sake of respect. He is one of Alucard's _generals_, not his convenient midnight snack.

“I guess we all look after the people we care about,” is what he finally settles on, shrugging his shoulders to resettle the fur of his cloak closer around his neck. There. Sympathize, admit to nothing specific.

Gregori just _looks_ at him for a long time, weighing that. “Indeed we do,” he finally says, cautious. “And protect those that need protecting.”

And it’s strange—that’s something Trevor’s always thought of in terms of humans needing protection from the creatures of the night, the dark forces intent on sowing chaos in their lives. But it’s not Sypha and him that need to be careful in Acasă, and supernatural complications aside, he’s seen firsthand the frankly bullshit way the Romani are often treated, back when he was travelling in the south of the continent. Protection, and the need for it, are a much more complicated picture than he used to think they were.

He glances over to the estate ruins, hovering so closely with all of their ghosts and memories. Maybe that’s why they stood and fought, even though they must have seen it coming—because the people needed them, needed their protection, from the church more than from any vampires or werewolves that night.

And they lost. But maybe it’s enough that they tried.

“I do hope none of those are fresh,” Gregori muses, between long scraping swipes of the whetstone. 

“Of course not,” Trevor lies, effortless. He remembers Isabel mentioning it, too: the vampires in the woods, indulging their hungers, and how it’s doing them no favors. He could use some clarification on that. “There a reason you’re asking?”

“Oh, just, you know what human blood does to them, tonight. Isabel keeps them all off it for a few weeks, before the solstice.”

Oh. _Oh._

It’s likely, Trevor thinks, that none of the shock that ripples through him is visible to the man in front of him. Open book he can be at times, he’s good at masking these things when it matters. But it still does shake him—heart suddenly hammering inside his chest, a wash of cold passing through him like there’s ice in his veins.

Human blood. Hell, forget that Adrian’s been nibbling on him here and there—that’s not enough volume to worry about. But game’s been scarce, so Trevor’s fallen behind the curve on replenishing those canisters with animal blood. He knows for an absolute, immutable fact that Adrian’s had to dip back into the human supply again, and as recently as this morning.

“Of course,” he says, casual, leaning sideways against the castle wall. “Everyone knows that.”

Inside, though?

_Shit. SHIT. Adrian, you fucking idiot._

* *

Adrian has holed up in the study, both because that is where the transmission mirror is, and because it is a place only he ever comes to, so it does not smell like anything except books and himself and the lingering fury and sadness of his father’s time. So it isn’t a pleasant place, but it’s a safe place; it quiets his nerves, cools the heat in his heart, soothes the ache in his fangs.

It’d frightened him, overlooking Trevor and Isabel earlier, that he’d found himself wanting Trevor between his teeth as much as he’d wanted him in his arms. He can only hope that when he needs the man around later, the adrenaline and rush of danger will keep his instincts focused in other directions. It’s never affected him like this before; he wonders if it would have, had he had a lover in other years, someone so skilled at stirring his baser instincts that he does it without even trying.

For now, he touches the glass of the mirror, traces his fingers along the fault line where the shards don’t line up perfectly, letting the edge slice finely into the pad of his thumb. It’s a bright shock of pain, satisfying in the way it gives him something purely outside of himself to think about, the way it _grounds_ him.

The door to the study swings open noiselessly. The smell of _humanlovepreysexblood _slams into Adrian, just about chokes him. He catches himself on his knees, hands braced there white-knuckled and nearly tight enough to dislocate his own kneecaps.

“All right,” Trevor says, sweeping into the room, and his voice is all _I’ve fucking had it with this_ but he still sets a hand on Adrian’s back, steadying and gentle. The proximity, the _contact_, the feel of his pulse, hammering through his palm— “Wasn’t sure if I was out of line bringing this up, but you just answered that for me.”

“I can control it,” Adrian grits out, straightening up, because it’s true, because it _has_ to be true.

“Really,” Trevor says, disbelieving, challenging. There’s a spark of trouble in his eyes. “So, you could hold it together if I were to…” he trails off, crowding up into Adrian’s space, sliding his hand up from the middle of his back to the back of his neck. It’s heavy and hot there, with no fabric in the way, and it twines into his hair—insurance, Adrian realizes. A way to get a solid grip on him, if it becomes necessary. Trevor’s wary, in a way he hasn’t been for months, but he still leans in recklessly close, the heat of his breath boiling over Adrian’s cheeks, the wet curve of his lower lip, the hollow of his throat. The scent of him is intoxicating and disorienting, inflaming, strikes Adrian dizzy with lust. The taste of him, too—his mouth soft and combative under Adrian’s, his body tense and hot where Adrian’s arm at the small of his back has dragged them together in a close press, binding him there in a predator’s grip, inescapable. 

It wouldn’t take much to just _have him,_ right here and now. They’re both hard, and the collar of the hunter’s shirt is already loose, exposed, and Adrian doesn’t know which his body wants more—to fuck Trevor blind or drink him dry, or _both. _What would that be like, to feel that strong body jerk and writhe in pleasure even as the life drains away from it, completely at Adrian’s mercy, heat and arousal thick on his tongue—

It’s not until there’s a jolt through both of them—Trevor’s back hitting the wall, the impact kicking a pained breath out of him—that Adrian comes back to himself enough to realize where they are and what is happening. To realize that Trevor’s fist in his hair is trying to pull him _away_, sharp but completely ineffectual in the wake of Adrian’s strength; that Trevor’s eyes are wide and urgent, not the languid half-lidded picture of lust he’d been imagining. That his own mouth is frighteningly close to Trevor’s pulse.

“...Adrian,” Trevor breathes, and Adrian can feel the vibration of his own name through his _teeth_. Trevor gives his hair another tug; it’s an attempt to get his attention, Adrian realizes, not an attempt to actually stop him. For that, Trevor has his weapons, which he has not even made a move to reach for. “_Stop_ for a second, here.”

Adrian closes his eyes, pushes through the feeling of Trevor hot under his hands, through the sound of his heart thudding like a primal drumbeat, through the full-body ache that’s spreading through him, demanding he _chasehuntfuckbitefeedkill_—pushes it all aside with more force of will than he’s ever had to muster, grasps desperately for lucidity. He feels his head fall forward, forehead coming to rest against Trevor's collarbone.

“Hey,” Trevor says, relaxing his hold on Adrian’s hair, scraping his fingers against the scalp instead. “You back with me?”

Fuck. This was a test—obviously it was—and he’s failed it miserably. He wants to be angry at Trevor, because Adrian could have _killed him,_ but maybe he shouldn’t have been so prideful about being in control when he _clearly_ wasn’t.

This is his fault. If it had ended badly, that would have been his fault too. He backs away without another thought, hands up in placation. “I’m sorry. That was—”

Trevor coughs, rubbing at his neck self-consciously. His color is high, breath a little ragged. “Honestly? It was hot, except for the bit where I really didn’t know if you were going to kill me or not. That was sort of a mood-killer.” 

Never. _Never._ Fantasies are just fantasies, even if they’re the unspeakable, fucked-up products of his own twisted and tainted and monstrous blood; he would _never—_

“Jesus, Adrian,” Trevor continues, sounding shaken. “Have you even seen your _eyes_?”

His… eyes? Adrian puts his internal diatribe on hold, turns to the mirror—he’d been looking _at_ it before, not so much _into_ it—and scrutinizes his own reflection. It doesn’t take much effort, to see what Trevor’s talking about: a blazing ring of brilliant red, bleeding into the whites of his eyes and into the gold of his irises. It pulses and swirls like liquid fire, and even his pupils look brighter than they should be, a dim flame burning in the black. 

“That’s… probably not good,” he says, transfixed. “When did that—”

“They were a little red earlier today, but nothing like _that_.”

He swallows tightly, ignores the way his body screams, hollow and empty. “Trevor, this… this has never happened before. This isn’t normal.” He shakes his head, trying to clear it. “This—this isn’t _me._”

“I believe that,” Trevor says, and thank god—if he didn’t believe him, if he thought that this is what had really been lurking under the surface this entire time…

Trevor comes up behind him so that he’s visible in the reflection too, giving him a face to speak to but stopping just short of actually making contact. “Because I know why it’s happening.”

“It’s because of you,” Adrian says, weakly, but no, that came out wrong—it’s not that it’s his _fault_, but him being here—it would have been the same if Sypha were here, it’s nothing Trevor _did_…

Trevor laughs, though there’s no real humor in it. It’s pure showmanship. “Fuck you, you bastard. I’m not the idiot who decided to dip into the good shit right before the solstice.”

“The good… what?” he asks, suddenly confused. Is Trevor talking about the rare, aged bottles of wine they bring up now and then? “I haven’t been drinking—”

“Yeah, you have. All that human blood on ice?”

Adrian draws his brows together, gives that some thought, or tries to—things are still muddled, shocky-feeling. “That causes…”

“Apparently, that takes whatever solstice crazy you already have going on and makes it worse, yeah,” Trevor sighs. “Kind of obvious, to be honest.”

It’s… all right. That makes sense. He’s never heard that, never had it crop up as an issue before, but it makes sense. He lifts his eyes, meets Trevor’s reflected gaze. Digs his claws hard into what clarity he has, for the moment. “Do we have _any_ animal blood on hand?”

Trevor shrugs, shakes his head. “I dressed a hare this morning—it’s not much, but it’s down there.”

Perhaps if he can dilute what’s in his system. Perhaps if he can gain back just enough control that they can survive this—both of them. All three of them, if they retrieve Sypha, and he’s giving serious thought to just doing it now and damn waiting for the attack to actually come. He wants her here, beside them, wants to be able to touch her and know she’s alive and press his lips to her throat and—

Trevor is looking at him with that same nervousness again, that look of _am I going to have to kick your ass?_

He ignores it, scratches a few quick sigils into the glass to focus its vision on the front entrance of the castle, where Isabel’s people are lying in wait with crossbows and longbows and spears. All quiet, at the moment. Good enough.

“I’ll be back,” he says, sidling past Trevor in an attempt to make no contact whatsoever. “Just… keep an eye on things. Use your judgment.”

* *

The hare’s blood is as rank as animal blood always is, but after a few minutes sitting on the cold floor of the storage room, letting it work its way into his system and displace some of what’s already there, his head does start to feel clearer—not _clear_, but clearer. He can, now, think about what happened in the study, what _almost_ happened, and feel more guilt than arousal. Guilt is the _only_ thing he should be feeling, but as things stand, this might be as good as it gets.

Chunks of magical ice grow organically out of the floor all around him, branching crystals, chaotic and natural looking; mist rolls off of them, chilling and soothing everything it touches. The cold of it is intense, bites through his clothes and sinks into him, grounds him like the pain did earlier.

He counts to ten forward and backward, first in his native tongue, then in Latin, French, German, Arabic. He runs through all the medicines his mother taught him about and what they’re each used for. He curls his fingers against the floor, clutching at the mist, and when he thinks of Sypha and of Trevor, it is more with worry and protectiveness than it is with desire. 

It isn’t ideal. It will, however, have to be good enough.

* *

When he feels stable enough to return to the study, he finds Trevor pacing in front of the mirror, hand on the haft of his Morning Star, collar fastened up more securely than Adrian thinks he’s ever seen it. Through the far window, he can see that night has just about fallen, the last curling wisps of orange and purple glowing through the cloud layer. 

“Oh hey,” Trevor says, frustration in every syllable. “Thanks for showing up. Where the hell were you?”

“Stabilizing.”

“For an _hour_?”

That throws Adrian; he hadn’t thought it much longer than fifteen minutes or so. He shrugs, steps to the mirror. “That’s how long it took. You’ll take comfort in knowing that your mere presence is no longer enough to make me want to tear your clothes off with my teeth.”

“Well, that’s good at least. I mean, hey, that could be fun, right? But not right now.”

God damn Trevor, and his complete lack of filters. That wasn’t a suggestion he needed. “Not right now, no. If you could refrain from—”

He never gets the rest of the request out, because there’s suddenly a fluttering noise by the window, like a rustling of wind through tall grass but with more weight behind it. Wings. They both whip around to look, and Adrian is expecting to see something deadly clambering through the window frame, a night creature or some other supernatural entity, blood of their allies already dripping from its toothy maw—

He’s not expecting an innocent, unassuming black and white pigeon, perched in the sill and idly cleaning its wingfeathers. It’s dingy and drooping, obviously exhausted, and there’s a tiny roll of parchment tied to one of its legs. 

“Huh,” Trevor says, crossing to the window. “Hey there, is that for us?”

The bird doesn’t answer, obviously. But it also doesn’t startle away as Trevor carefully reaches to untie the bit of paper, turns back to the room with it in hand. The pigeon, missive delivered, flutters clumsily _into_ the room instead of out of it, and no wonder; it’s warm, in here.

“What is it?” Adrian asks; clearly from someone with access to enchanted beasts, which isn’t encouraging—a black magician, a sorcerer—

“It’s from Sypha,” Trevor says simply, eyebrows raised. “I almost forgot that the Speakers do this, with pigeons. Here.”

Adrian takes the note, unrolls it again, the paper wanting badly to stay curled. 

_A, T — _

_I need to return home, as soon as possible. <strike>You’re in danger. </strike>_

_ <strike>I think you might be</strike> _

_ <strike>I’m worried about you b</strike> _

_Use the mirror. I will see you soon._

_— S_

“Well, that settles that,” Trevor says, once he’s sure Adrian has read the whole thing. “Let’s get her the hell here, _now_.”

“Agreed,” Adrian says, a little distracted by the feel of the parchment in his fingers, the smell of the ink. It’s very physical, very visceral, and all of his senses are on high alert right now—and there’s something about all of this that’s bothering him. He doesn’t doubt the veracity of the note—he can smell Sypha on it, even after days clutched to a bird’s breast. But there’s something…

“Adrian?” Trevor prods. “I can’t actually work this thing, you know.”

“Right, of course,” he says, pocketing the slip of paper, stepping up to the mirror. This is complicated, shaping the sigils correctly to point not to a place but a person—to find Sypha wherever she is. He has to take his time, inscribing them with care, but something is driving him to hurry, _hurry_.

Trevor is getting antsy next to him. Up near the ceiling, the pigeon has found a perch, is fluffing out its feathers noisily.

A scraping sound, against the stone wall outside. Below the window. The sigils are nearly done, and there’s still _something_—

Trevor makes for the window, to investigate. Adrian desperately wants to stop him but he couldn’t begin to explain _why_, just knows that he wants Trevor anywhere but by that window, _anywhere._ It makes no sense, the wards should be sufficient to protect—

The pigeon burbles from its perch, oblivious to the tension, content.

The pigeon.

The wards.

“_Trevor!_” he shouts, the last sigil sinking into the mirror glass, the surface starting to shimmer as it hones in on another place, a life and a world away—he catches a glimpse of a bonfire, of colorful fabric and blue robes, of a sky black as pitch—

Then the mirror doesn’t matter, because the night sky outside the window is abruptly blocked out. In its place, the bloodied figure of a vampire, crouched to fit in the frame, hair matted and disheveled, eyes wild. It hisses at them like a sick, starving cat. At other windows, more figures appear, all mad with bloodlust, all intent on very particular prey.

Trevor stays composed. He takes a step back. He reaches for the grip of the Morning Star.

The vampire isn’t interested. He leaps into the room with an effortless grace, sweeps Trevor bodily aside with a strength he’s never seen—is on Adrian before Trevor can even shout a warning.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DUN DUN DUNNNNNN
> 
> Wow. That took a long time, and it's actually only half the content I wanted in this chapter. Sorry! I had school shit! School makes fandom hard.
> 
> Hello, Spots! Good of you to finally join the party! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, BIRBFRIEND?
> 
> Also, Adrian really needed a timeout, huh?


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took a while. Action scenes are a pain in the ass.

*

Solstice night. The longest night. The sun set hours ago, here on the coast of the Black Sea, tracking its way westward toward the foothills and the mountains beyond them and, eventually, all the rest of Europe. Toward home. 

Will it be dark there, yet? Will the wolves be closing in?

Sypha can’t justify hiding herself away as she waits, not tonight. The waiting has become a desperate vigil, something that recognizes its own futility but refuses to bend under the weight of that recognition. But tonight is important and if she is here, if she _must_ still be here against all her wishes, she will at least be present for it.

She’s cleaved close to the people she cares most about all evening: her grandfather, Lily and Arn, Kiri, the others who kept her family group knit together when outside forces did their best to claw it apart, all those years ago. They eat, fresh bread from the cooking stones and warm rabbit stew, laced with exotic spices from all over their people’s collective range, little pops of heat and sweetness and green earthiness, peppery and rich. 

It’s a celebration meal. Tomorrow morning, the sun is reborn. She knows that isn’t how it really works—has seen the planetary models in the castle library, knows that the sun is a fixed point and certainly neither lives nor dies—but that’s never really been the point. It’s a midpoint, a way to mark time, and the lengthening days mean warmth and easier travel and eventually better food stores.

In front of her, the bonfire crackles, raging mindlessly, consuming its fuel, throwing embers; something about it steals the breath from her lungs for just a moment. It feels something like the weight of sudden, unbearable prophecy, but almost more primitive than that. Inescapable, not like fate is inescapable but like _gravity _is inescapable.

There’s a shimmering off to her side, and it draws her attention before she consciously acknowledges it. It’s like a heat mirage, rising from the road in midsummer, and it hangs human-sized in the air, obscuring everything behind it. Caught up as she is in the breathless oppression of the fire, it takes Sypha a moment to realize what she’s looking at.

The mirror.

It’s—it’s the _mirror_. They got the message, they—they’re _alive_, and they got her message, and this is her passage home— but—

“Sypha?” her grandfather says from her other side, settling one hand on her shoulder. “That is what you have been waiting for, no?”

“It is, but...” 

But something isn’t right. She squints into the shimmer, can make out the far wall of the study, but no one has come through to greet her. What if—what if her message fell into the wrong hands? What if this is a trick? What if—

Then, in the haze: a body flying past in flames, and a very familiar figure following after it, the brilliant glow of the chain whip’s weighted end tearing through the space ahead of him. A hoarse cry. Wood splintering, glass breaking. There’s a splash of blood across the far wall, vibrant and lurid, and was that there a second ago?

In any event: that answers that.

“Okay,” she says, shouldering the pack she hasn’t let out of her sight for days, bracing herself for whatever she finds on the other side. Her boys are in trouble; they _need_ her. “I’m going.”

Her grandfather makes a nonverbal noise, like someone restraining themselves from saying what their heart most wants to express. _It’s dangerous. Stay here. Stay safe with us._

“Good luck, my angel,” is all he actually says—or, if he says more, it’s lost to her as she leaps into the breach, sound and vision smearing, reality disappearing up itself in a twisting, sucking inversion that leaves her, momentarily, unsure that the physical world ever existed, that she ever, in fact, had a body—

—then suddenly she’s _there_, and the shift from quiet night spaces, the calm hiss and pop of the fire, to this cacophony—it sets Sypha’s every nerve on end, her entire body protesting everything about what just happened in waves of churning nausea. She fights it down. Not the time. _Not the fucking time._

Her pack hits the floor hard and she casts around, urgent, taking it all in.

There are at least eight… enemy combatants, in the study with them. They _look_ like vampires but they’re acting more like mindless monsters, with none of the grace she’d seen in their combat against Dracula’s generals. No weapons. No subtlety. Just tooth and claw, and speed, and ferocity. Feral.

They’ve got Adrian cornered against the far bookshelf, swiping and charging from every angle. He has a bloody gash across his face, his hair stuck to the wound, ghoulish. His eyes are wild from the fight, nearly as wild as those surrounding him. He has his sword in hand—not in the air, not aiding him as she knows it can when he’s at his best, but simply slashing inelegantly at arm’s length, keeping the surrounding vampires at bay.

She visualizes a fireball between her fingers, wills it into existence—wastes no time thinking about _why_ he’s having so much trouble, and sends it straight into the thickest knot of them. Demons might resist flame but vampires, she knows with certainty, _burn_. 

Two of them light up, screaming, filling the air with the acridness of burning flesh—then the Morning Star comes slashing through out of nowhere, ripping one of the feral vampires just about in half even as it embeds itself in the next one over, waves of energy rippling through it to blow the second one apart from the inside out. 

That’s four down. That’s good.

“The mirror!” Trevor shouts to Adrian, and she’s not sure he even knows she’s here yet, as preoccupied as he is with getting the mob off of Adrian. He swings the whip again, a good amount of its length coiled around his fist to shorten the throw in this confined space—lands only a glancing blow, enough to enrage but not really damage, an ugly welt burned across the vampire’s face.

It hisses, furious. Sypha readies another fireball, to back up the missed shot. Trevor smirks into the thing’s face, unaccountably smug.

“Oh, that hurt, didn’t it?” he snarls, swinging the bladed star almost lazily in between them. Taunting. Backing his way toward the door, the staircase leading down. “Come on, I’m a _way_ more interesting target than prince prissy-hair, here.” 

Ah. He missed on purpose—he’s trying to goad them away from Adrian. And it’s working; they’re worked up, agitated, and maybe it’s the smell of Belmont blood so nearby, dripping from his hand where it clutches the whip’s handle, but they’re peeling away from Adrian, easing their predatory, monstrous way toward Trevor instead. 

That’s all the window Adrian needs—with a pained hiss, he phases through the gap they’ve cut for him, right to Sypha’s side. Turns to the mirror without a thought, hair hanging lank and bloodied in his face, red-stained claws working at the mirror’s surface. Working to shut it down, she realizes with a chill--to seal it, so that none of their attackers decides to go barreling through and have Speaker for dessert. 

A lot of things happen all at once, then. 

Trevor doesn’t have a straight shot to the door—there’s one coming up behind him, cutting that path off, and with a shout, Sypha sends the fireball she’s been holding straight into its face. It catches fire, screams and flails, is easy for Trevor to sweep aside and get past, but there are suddenly more of them in the room than there had been and oh, they’re _coming through the windows_. Right through what should have been impenetrable wards.

Adrian seals the mirror, the Speaker camp fading from the glass. He turns to her, as if he’s just now noticing she’s there. A shrieking, wild-eyed vampire drops from the window behind them, and before she can even summon more flame, the sword in Adrian’s hand has whipped out and cleaved it cleanly in two.

“Sypha,” he breathes, staring; he didn’t even take his eyes off her to make the strike. They’re wide, wild with red, desperate and longing—and before she knows what’s happening he’s sweeping her up with an arm around her waist, pulling her into a kiss that is nothing short of ravenous. He doesn’t even try to be gentle, as he usually is with her; it’s all teeth and possession, a primal sort of hunger that seeks to pleasure but also to claim, to make her moan and make her bleed, to turn her world inside out. 

It is, frankly, a fantastic kiss.

But it goes on just a touch too long, in the circumstances—they surely paint an attractive picture, Adrian with his bloody sword held aloft, Sypha with her hands ringed in fire, the two of them locked in the impassioned embrace of lovers too long separated. But they are being just a little bit invaded by vampires, and that fact demands attention, demands _focus._

“Okay,” she says against his mouth, putting her hands flat to his chest and pushing; he’s immovable when he wants to be, but he’s learned these cues and he bends to it now, letting her put space between them. “Kill vampires now. Continue that later?”

A flash in his eyes, a sharp-toothed grin, and he swings back into action—maybe not as graceful as he usually is, maybe a little rushed, but no less lethal with that blade, now that he’s out from being cornered.

When she looks, she realizes that Trevor’s gone, off down the staircase already, most of the remaining vampires on his tail, and it’s the effort of a mere thought to fill that corridor with flame, purge the creatures in pursuit of their hunter, give them nothing but embers and ash to pass through to find their way back to his side.

* *

“How the _fuck_ are they getting through the wards?” Trevor mutters; he doesn’t expect an answer, is too busy dodging a wild, animalistic swipe of claws through the space his face had just been in, moments before. He catches the arm on its way by, lets the beast’s momentum carry it face-first into the stone of the staircase wall, taking advantage of it being momentarily stunned stupid to slam a throwing knife through its throat. The body tumbles down the stairs, out of sight.

“They’re old,” Adrian says from beside him, his presence crowding in on Trevor’s, which is comforting enough when he’d thought himself alone, but then—

“They’re not _that_ old,” a familiar voice, one he hasn’t heard in two weeks, sharp and a little flustered and no wonder, dropping into the middle of an assault with no warning.

“_Sypha,_” he says, sheer relief, and before she can go on a tirade about the fact that wards don’t _work_ that way, they don’t just turn off when they age, something else is going on and he knows, he knows—he reaches out and pulls her in by the back of her neck, presses a quick kiss to her temple, breathes her in. It’s the contact of an instant but in that instant: soft curl of hair against his cheek, smell of salt air and woodsmoke, magic shimmering beneath his lips like a second skin.

“I missed you too,” she says, smirking a little as he breaks away, leans to peer around the archway. “But Adrian has your greeting beaten by a mile.”

“Yeah, well,” Trevor says, no patience for mincing words. “That’s because _apparently_ the solstice makes vampires go feral, and in his _special_ case that translates to ‘horny as fuck’.”

“Trevor…” Adrian growls, warning.

"Really?" Sypha asks, something in the tone saying that she already believes him. Trevor spares half a second to wonder what he missed, bailing out of the study like he did. 

"Oh yeah,” he says, hooking the chain whip back to his belt, reaching to unsheathe the sword instead. The staircase is narrow and winding, and anything coming up it to meet them will be in close quarters before they can blink. He edges down the stairs, one at a time, hyperfocused on the space in front of them. “Shame we're being invaded, this could have been a really fun night."

“_Belmont.”_

Sypha laughs, all nerves, magic crackling around her. "You would have had me miss that?"

"Oh my god, no,” Trevor says, grinning despite himself, despite the situation. Suddenly, everything feels right again; it feels like things can be okay, if they just hold onto their wits and see this through, try not to get sloppy. “You'd have to be here, or he'd wear me the fuck out."

“If we are _quite done_ discussing this,” Adrian says from behind them, glower audible in his voice; when Trevor risks a glance up and behind at him, he can see that the gash on his face is nearly closed, that his eyes are still bright with blood but not like they were _before_. There’s a focus there now, a clarity, that he’d lacked. Good enough. “Can we consider having an actual plan?”

“What,” Trevor says, “and ruin our perfect record of jumping into things blind and pulling off stunning victories regardless?”

“They haven’t all been stunning.”

“But they _have_ all been victories.”

“Yes, yes,” Sypha cuts in, already sounding exasperated. “Recklessness is very dashing, until it isn’t anymore.”

And Trevor’s about to say something smartarsed in return, then stops himself, wonders for a moment if all this solstice madness is catching, because of course she’s completely, totally right. “Fine, okay. Got any ideas?”

“What do they want?” Sypha asks, voice low. 

Trevor jerks his thumb over his shoulder at Adrian, self-explanatory. “Single-minded, too. Took a lot to get them to go after me instead.”

“I saw some of that,” she says, considering. “So should we hide him, or…?”

Adrian grumbles something disagreeable; Trevor ignores him. “What I _want_ to do is hide him under a rock somewhere, yeah.” That’s what his gut wants, what his heart wants. The screams echoing through the stone walls, vampires breaching their defenses anywhere there’s a window, are a solid reminder of why he needs to listen to his head instead, right now. “What would be _smart _to do is use him to lure them out into the open and take them all out at once.”

“Can you _do_ that?”

Right, she isn’t up to date on all of their preparations yet. He scrapes the sword lightly against the stone as they descend, hoping to draw out anything that’s waiting for them around the next turn. “If you’re okay with no hot baths for a while.” 

“That was supposed to be an option of last resort,” Adrian protests vaguely. 

“Yeah, well, that was when we thought we had control over their points of entry and assumed we could bottleneck them,” Trevor says, and he can hear the irritation in his own voice. “Some of the variables have shifted. Besides, we hide you away, all that’s going to do is drive them into every nook and cranny in this place looking for you. It’ll take weeks to root them all out.”

“I’m not in favor of _hiding—”_

“All right, then,” Trevor whispers, drawing to a halt; up around the next bend, the light’s different, brighter. Intersection? Open landing? He almost never takes this staircase. “Do you have another suggestion?”

“We go down to the hall and we fight,” Adrian grits out, still sounding a little breathy, a little wild. “Keep the water as a backup plan, but try to fight them off first.”

Trevor shakes his head, sighs in frustration. “That could rack up casualties. Who’s being reckless now?”

Just a low growl in response, and okay, frustration is no longer the word; Trevor has officially fucking had it with this.

“No,” he says, turning to take hold of the collar of Adrian’s jacket; he tosses Sypha a look that he hopes conveys _cover the stairwell for me while I talk some sense into this idiot. _Bright orange lights up between them all as she primes a spell. “You don’t just _growl_ and get your way, that isn’t how this works.”

That seems to shake him—the snarling, bloodstained visage collapses into a mask of shame, flush rising up his face. “I wasn’t trying to threaten—”

“Listen to me, Adrian,” Trevor interrupts, because good _god_ do they not have time for a guilt spiral. “You’re not thinking clearly right now. You’re spoiling for a fight and _I get it_, okay? I do. But a fight will get people killed. It could get one of us killed. And normally we wouldn’t have a choice but to risk it, but we’re in a crazy position right now—we have a way to take out all of them with minimal casualties, and it would be _beyond_ insane not to use it.”

A huff of breath, defiant. “You don’t have to—they only want me.”

“Yeah, they do. They want you dead, and they want it bad, and they’re not going to have a, a civilized duel with you following the rules of engagement, all right?” Not that the dhampir could even handle _that_, right now, but Trevor’s not going to push his luck by provoking ego. “Adrian. I need you to trust me, I need you to trust that I know what I'm doing.”

“We have talked about this,” Sypha adds, not looking up from where she’s sighting down the length of her arm, flame at the ready. “We trust each other, and we work together.”

Something about the sound of her voice, so familiar and so painfully absent for the last two weeks, seems to get through to Adrian where his own words have failed—she plucks a chord in him, or maybe just completes one, the dissonance of two notes rounding out into three, and it’s like watching a sleepwalker come back to themselves.

“Of course,” Adrian says, finally, reaching to sheathe his mother’s bloodied sword; in this close, tight corridor it would be next to useless anyway. He draws the knife from his other hip, settles it comfortably in his hand. “Lead the way.”

* *

Isabel had not been lying when she told the Belmont: she is no commander of soldiers. She had still hoped that, crazed as their attackers are tonight, her thoughtful leadership and the Belmont’s tactical prowess would give them enough of an edge to keep the enemy forces from breaching the castle.

Hope, it turns out, while not completely useless, does not win battles. 

She’s out here with her four ranged comrades, and Belmont had brought them an entire crate of bolts from who knows where; they’re not in danger of running out. But they’re also making little headway. Have they managed to thin the attacking mob? Yes. Have they eliminated it? Not by a long shot. A bigger force than they expected, maybe, but four marksmen just aren’t enough.

So. Fine. There are other ways to go about this.

The crossbow bolts are still whizzing dangerously close as she darts out of cover, gets a running leap off of the stone banister, jumps directly into the fray. The bodies are thickest where the massive doors have started to bow inward, the insane strength of those bodies undirected except for the most basic drive: break down the doors, get into the castle. 

She lands among them, claws three of their throats out before they even register her presence. It’s easy to duck and weave among them, their reflexes dulled by bloodlust and unused to seeing their own kind as an enemy, and so she tries to carve the still-beating heart of the mob out of its chest, winnows and thins them from within.

A crossbow bolt plants itself into a vampire’s eye socket, less than a foot from her own. The sound of metal striking dense, heavy bone echoes in her ears, as does the screaming that follows. In the single moment’s disorientation, she catches a set of claws across her face, splitting her cheek open down to the bone, and without a second thought she takes hold of the arm that did it, snaps it in two, reels the attacker in and drives her own claws into his throat.

And if this is all she can do now, be a whirlwind of claws that rends apart her own people, the ones who would ruin everything she and hers have fought for—so be it. Her people have their orders; they know what they need to be doing. If she falls here, they will fight on.

There’s a horrible screaming of metal, mechanisms twisting under strain, and the doors begin to give way.

* *

The sudden noise of the door mechanisms failing and the roaring of their invaders is jarring, harrowing, after so much silence and so much waiting. They’ve heard screams elsewhere in the castle, echoing in that labyrinthine way that teases and taunts but is impossible to ever actually track down—and they’ve stayed put, because they are those doors’ last line of defense.

Now, as the doors give way, the attackers start spilling in as soon as there’s a gap wide enough to pass a body through—climbing over one another, fighting each other to get in, some of them already bloodied, some of them injured and healing in front of their eyes. All of them mad.

On the upper landing, at the top of the stairs, Jeanne resettles her grip on her shortsword, squares her stance. She stands among humans, but she is no stranger to fighting vampires; they’re always curious about her, always wanting to see how her strength holds up to theirs, how her relative lack of weaknesses will play out in a fight. She is no stranger to _sparring_ with vampires, or with having to forcefully turn away troublemakers at her people’s gates. She has never killed one, never wanted to kill anyone, does not truly believe herself capable of facing an intelligent being and taking its life.

These, though?

These are horrifying. These aren’t people. They’re animals, monsters, slavering beasts. And they were human once—something even she cannot claim—but right now, they are just fodder for her sword and her claws, fodder for the blades and spears of the five who stand around her. 

Tomorrow, they might be different. The morning may find their sanity restored. 

Guilt can, also, come in the morning. Right now, she has a job to do.

* *

Luca Gregori considers himself a patient man. He is practiced in all forms of acceptance, these days; he is not quick to judge. Alucard of Wallachia, infamously opposed to killing, killed his own father? He _clearly_ had a good reason. The Belmont is more than just a general, to his Lord? The stuff of crazy gossip, maybe, but to him it’s not even worth a second thought. That vampires are not just monsters, that they are as unique as the humans they once were and as individually responsible for their choices as anyone else—this is a foregone conclusion for him, these days. But it is perhaps for the best that he has never, before now, gone abroad on this night, because this horrorscape is enough to sour anyone on the night world.

He’s bleeding from his shoulder, where one of the beasts got their claws into him. It’s his off arm, so it’s not impeding the swing of his grandfather’s blade, but it throbs and aches and he knows it’s going to draw more of them, and the whole point of being here is to get inside and let the others know that things are going to shit—but they’re going to _such_ shit, so quickly, that it’s all he can do to keep fighting them off, keep the entrance he’s guarding protected.

A pause in the onslaught—a chance to draw breath, halting and rough—then another is there, is leaping clear over him, alighting on the wall above his head, clearly more interested in the window above than in tangling with him directly.

Too bad. The sword becomes a projectile, spearing the intruder through the chest as if they’re made of no more than paper; all that sharpening had a purpose. The vampire tumbles, sword and all, to his feet. Goes still.

Luca doesn’t hesitate—he pulls the blade free, brings it up as he spins back toward the open grounds, anticipating another attack.

Another attack doesn’t come.

The night isn’t silent, not remotely—but the commotion seems, suddenly, to be elsewhere. He can hear a ruckus from around the corner of the castle wall, where the main entrance sits, and he supposes that the defenses there might be falling. He considers the tactical implications of abandoning his post and offering aid.

Then, from the corner of his eye: a flicker of light, in the ruins of the old, burned out estate.

* *

From the moment his eyes met Sypha’s in the study, from the moment he held her against him and felt her pulse racing and the heat of the fire in her hands and the determination she held in her heart to save them, to save both of them—

Adrian isn’t sure how to explain it. It feels like something that’d been swirling, dangerous and intoxicating, through his brain and his gut has, somehow, settled. It’s still _there_, glinting in the sediment like gold dust, begging to be stirred back up, tempting the swipe of a lazy, greedy hand. But the water between them is finally clear.

He wonders: how much of this is the blood, how much Trevor’s proximity, how much the primal desperation of longing for an absent lover?

They encounter few opponents on their descent. One of them Sypha impales with a long, deadly spear of ice, one Trevor neatly beheads, and the third falls under the bite of the traitorous blade in Adrian’s hand, screaming and bleeding. And perhaps it is too agonizing a death to inflict on anyone—but they ought not have attacked him and his loved ones, then.

He remembers Trevor saying it, in the field outside the castle: _If you ever breathe threateningly at me or mine—_

This isn’t vengeance, he knows, shaking the blood from the blade and continuing onward. It is self-defense, defense of his home. Defense of their _life_, of the way they’ve chosen to live, and damn anyone who thinks they have any right to punish him for it.

* *

When they finally reach the entry hall, when his boots land in exactly the sort of bloodstain he had hoped his new carpets would never see, the scene is utter chaos—and not all that dissimilar to the scene they themselves had broken up when they strode in that front entrance a year ago. A home under assault. Those loyal to its master standing in its defense. 

This time, though, the fighting doesn’t pull to an awed standstill when they enter the room—not that any of them expect it to.

Still, Trevor swears, low. He’d obviously been hoping the doors hadn’t failed yet, that this could be done _cleanly. _Now, there will have to be a fight, which means there will be losses. Scanning around, Adrian can tell that most of the unmoving bodies scattered about belong to their enemies, ragged-looking in a way that none of Isabel’s people had been, but there is a downed human among them, moaning and clutching his middle and probably not long for the world.

“Have any gotten past you?” Trevor shouts to the small knot of fighters holding the upper landing against the assault. This room was designed to be a funnel, to be easily defensible from this spot, and Trevor had been wise to only station their defenses here, rather than wasting them elsewhere in the hall. If his father’s generals had been half as savvy, the three of them would have had a much harder time taking that first victory. “Into the rest of the castle?”

“_No_,” a young woman snarls back, blood in her short dark hair, fangs flashing. “They’d have to kill us all first.” She brings her sword around in an elegant arc, takes her attacker’s hands clean off, then lodges the blade deep into the vampire’s ribcage to finish him off. She’s untrained—that much is obvious from the way she handles the blade like an edge and like a point alternately, depending on what she needs, but she’s fast and fluid and far stronger than any of her compatriots, and has a natural fighter’s instincts.

It makes complete sense, given that she’s Isabel’s resident dhampir. Something he’s been asked to accept in passing, as if it were a common thing. As if he’d met another in his life, _ever_.

Adrian’s self control is already worn to a thin patch, barely there, threadbare. It takes a monumental act of restraint to not just snatch this one up mid-battle and hide her away somewhere _safe_, if only to be sure she’ll live long enough to speak with him. Because as solid a fighter as she is, she’s getting overwhelmed.

He can’t do that, can’t deprive the battle of her strength. But there are other ways he can help her odds of survival.

“Belmont,” he says, reverting smoothly to formality. He draws his sword again, readies both blades. “Can you handle the water?”

“Can _you_ get those doors closed?” Trevor counters, changing his sword out for his whip, the links clinking at the movement. On the other end of the long hall, the doors are gaping open to the night, their mechanisms stripped and ruined; there's no one coming through them, which is a pretty good sign that they’re all already in here. Trevor send the weighted end of the whip whispering through the air, taking his targets out with terrifying precision. “If this is going to be a killing pen,” he grunts between throws, “then we really need to _close the gate_.”

“I can do it,” Sypha says, looking between them, her gaze settling on Adrian, and it’s like she can see straight through him, right to the core of his anguish. “Go help them, I will handle it.”

There’s a suspended moment there—they are three again, they are together, they are within touching distance and are within each other’s grasp—and then Sypha leans in and embraces them both, quick and hard. 

And then she is, again, gone—headed down the stairs to traverse the sea of bodies that the entry hall has become, dodging and weaving around swords and claws and worse, angling to get closer to the entryway. 

Adrian watches her, watches the fluidity of her movements, the way she skirts danger so effortlessly—then her hands go into the air above her head and a gust of wind kicks up, forceful. The doors slam shut with a resonant thud.

All that’s left to do, then, is give Trevor a significant nod, the man’s hand tightening on his shoulder before letting him go, and dive into the fight.

* *

Trevor doesn’t know exactly what Sypha did to _seal _the doors, once she’d closed them. It apparently involved melting the moving parts because she claims, in clipped shouts over the roar of fire, that they cannot be opened again right now.

Which—_shit_. It shouldn’t have mattered, he’d all but demanded they be closed, but—

There’s a panel set into the wall here, under his hand, modeled to look like just another stone; beneath it, something Adrian connected up to the same magical—sorry, _science_—bullshit that lights the torches by themselves. When he presses it, it will cause an ember of flame to burn _something_, something that very much likes to burn, that likes it so much that it tends to explode; the pressure will tear apart the pipes running through the castle, to a lesser degree the further away it gets. But here in the main hall, it will be a downpour.

There’s a panel under his hand, and when he presses it, holy water will pour down like rain and it will melt away every vampire in the entry hall like the last grey, gritty snow of spring.

There’s _also_ a vampire staring across at him, black braids disheveled and tattered, blood streaked across her face, fierce determination burning in the burgundy eyes. Fucking Isabel. She shouldn’t _be_ here, shouldn’t have followed the attackers inside, the fucking _idiot_; this is why the status of the doors is, suddenly, important. “Why are you—I _told you_ not to be here, we have to—”

“Do what you need to, Belmont,” she interrupts, steely, eyes only for the fight. “I was warned; I made my choice. I won’t have any of my people die because you dragged this out for my sake.”

“Fuck,” Trevor says, and then, because once is rarely enough: _“Fuck.”_

“It’s been an honor,” she says, ignoring his invectives, holding a clawed, bloody hand out expectantly.

And for just a second, Trevor just looks at it—looks back up at the landing, where her people are weakening, becoming overwhelmed, even with Adrian’s help. Looks to Sypha, summoning ice and fire, holding her own effortlessly for the moment but how long can that last?

An honor, she says. And against his best efforts, it has been.

He can’t wait. He knows that. This is their one chance to keep the casualties in their favor, and the window is narrowing. 

His hand rests on the panel. Just another ounce of pressure.

Sypha, twenty feet away, spinning solidity from the moisture in the very air, projectiles that pierce like steel, barriers that protect her like any shield... 

Trevor narrows his eyes.

“Fuck that,” he says, smacking Isabel’s hand aside, everything coming together. “_Sypha!_ Need some ice over here _now_.”

“On it!” she shouts back, and it’s like she’s been listening in and already knows what he’s asking for—the ice blooms from the air, swirling around Isabel, enclosing her within its walls like something caught in a glass bottle. Trevor finds himself, as always, impressed with both Sypha’s talents and her perceptiveness, with her almost preternatural way of knowing exactly what they need when, in any fight, in any challenge. How did they ever survive two weeks without her?

He slams the panel hard.

A half second of held breath, a building roar, and then: the rains come.

* *

Sypha thinks, in the split second she has to spare between one task and the next, that she should get a _medal_ for figuring things out, after this fight is over. 

It’s not as if they’d had much time to explain things to her—between the need for vigilance on the staircase and the need to split up down here in the hall, all she’d managed to pick up was that they had some new allies fighting with them, and that Trevor had some sort of plan involving a mass dousing. Putting it all together, well—she’s just that good.

“I guess that’s that for this group,” Trevor says, shaking the water from his sleeves, wringing it out of his hair with an antsy urgency. The downpour hadn’t lasted long—a tremendous amount of water, but whatever they did to open the pipes, it had been incredibly effective. Possibly overkill. Definitely overkill in terms of their attackers, and someone with a weaker stomach would probably be turning green by now, overwhelmed by all the strangled screaming and the smell of charred flesh, bodies consumed in blue flame, ashes floating down all around them.

Sypha’s never had a particularly weak stomach. She’s seen worse; she’s _done_ worse.

So, left standing: The three of them, and their human allies up on the landing, and the vampire Trevor had had her lock into ice—the only one of them all not sopping wet from head to toe, and thankfully so, if she’s really on their side. 

“God, that feels fucking _weird,” _Trevor complains under his breath and to no one in particular, shaking a foot as if that will somehow empty his boots of the water she can hear sloshing in his socks.

Adrian raises an eyebrow at Trevor from the landing, sheathing his sword, his knife. He looks like a very blonde drowned rat, and he’s just as antsy, like he’s been wrapped entirely in itchy wool. And that’s no surprise from _him_, in the circumstances, but— 

“Does it?” Adrian asks, keenly curious. Sypha narrows her eyes at both of them, wonders if maybe there’s something else in the water, some irritant or chemical that she’s just not feeling yet.

But Trevor just shakes his head dismissively. “Not the time,” he grumbles, reaching for the whip at his side, suddenly all business. “There might be more of them further up in the castle, we can’t let our guard down.”

“Then let me eliminate a distraction,” Sypha offers, pressing her hands together in front of her face. This is not her specialty, so she will have to focus, but it will do no good to have saved their ally only to have her burned by the floor they stand on—and regardless of Trevor’s grousing, Adrian is, she’s sure, legitimately uncomfortable. She summons a gust of air that rises from the space around her, a concentrated blast of dry wind that ripples through her robes, through her hair, stripping the moisture right off of her. 

Once she feels her own hair brushing dry against the nape of her neck, she sends the wind outward, swirling through the hall like a cyclone, pulling the water from skin and hair and clothes, from carpets and tapestries, and carrying it all up and away.

Well. Not _away_. It has to go somewhere, but she’ll cross that bridge later. 

“Better?” she asks.

Adrian shakes his hair out like the mane of some legendary beast. It’s still got that humidity dampness to it, that extra fluffiness, but it’s an improvement. “Much. Thank you.”

And she’s just about to go start melting their visitor out of her ice cage—she’ll need to get the story from Trevor later, of how exactly a _vampire_, not a dhampir but a full-blooded vampire, managed to earn such loyalty from him—when a man she’s never seen before suddenly appears through one of the side doors, right behind Trevor, wheezing and out of breath from running. The sword in his hand is coated in dark, stale-looking blood. 

“Trevor!” she shouts, bringing up a fresh fireball, but when Trevor spins to face the intruder, his stance immediately relaxes, hand leaving the hilt of his sword. 

“It’s all right,” he says, one hand out to her to say, _stand down_. “He’s one of ours. Gregori? What’s going on?”

“It’s—” Wheeze, cough. “They’re—”

“They’re _what?_” Trevor demands, patience thin.

A prolonged, whistling inhale, desperate for air, and then the man visibly makes an effort to compose himself, to regulate his breathing. “They’re gathered in the ruins,” he manages, then takes a deliberate breath. “Talking about a vault or something. That they’re going to get a weapon that will make them unbeatable? That’s all I got—I couldn’t keep listening, they would have spotted me—”

“Fuck,” Trevor breathes, glancing at the doors, and Sypha knows: the hold.

“Wait,” Adrian says, holding up a hand, forestalling Trevor’s obvious kneejerk reaction of running off to defend his family’s legacy without a moment’s thought. “They should have spotted you regardless. Or smelled you. And they acted as if they didn’t?”

“Actually, yeah,” Trevor says, narrowing his eyes at Gregori. “That sounds a little bit like bullshit. _Is_ it bullshit, or is there something else going on?”

“I saw what I saw,” the man says, puffing up in defense of his assaulted pride. “I can’t explain it, but I’m not lying to you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Trevor murmurs, after a long, considered study of the man’s face. He presses one hand across his eyes, gestures with the other. “Maybe he’s lying to get us there, or maybe they let him get away so he’d bring this information to us, which is _also_ a ploy to get us there.”

“It is a trap either way.” 

“Or they just want us to leave the castle undefended.”

Sypha sighs, fingers twitching restlessly around her magic, half-sigils that she’d trained into muscle memory to avoid accidentally conjuring fire when she’s restless. “But we can’t leave it alone, can we?”

Trevor just shakes his head. “Okay,” he says, after a thoughtful moment. “Sypha, get our frozen bloodsucker off ice. Jeanne?”

A dark-haired young woman turns at the summons, hands braced on the landing’s banister, paying perfect attention. There’s a stillness to her that’s a little unnerving to Sypha, almost like...

“They’re not getting in the front,” Trevor says, clipped, as Sypha carefully directs her fire, melting away the walls of the impromptu ice shelter. “If they come from anywhere it’ll be those little doors on the side there. You think your people can handle that?”

Jeanne looks to the newly freed Isabel, who despite seeming a little dazed, nods sharply. 

“All right,” Trevor says, sounding like a man who has no idea if he’s doing the right thing, is doing it anyway and damn the consequences. “Good enough. Let’s go.”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HYDRO STORM!!!  
HYDRO STORM!!!  
HYDRO STORM!!!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't hold this back any longer. I am, unlike some characters in this story, only human.
> 
> Warning for a pretty intense bit of fantasy violence near the end.

*

It isn’t far to the ruins; the castle is technically among them. The snow poses an obstacle, slowing them down, but it still does not take them long to get to the hold’s entrance—ringed by torches, by dark looming figures doing their best to be menacing. 

It’s still enough time, as the scenery rushes past in a blur of black sky and moonlight-painted snowy hills, for Trevor to have a couple significant thoughts.

For starters: Sypha’s wards all breaking at once, conveniently on the night they were meant to be attacked. Seems unlikely. Seems impossible. Points to preparation, premeditation.

Then there’s the vampires themselves, so feral with bloodlust that they were walking right into Sypha’s fire, but so bent on killing Adrian _specifically_. It’s almost as if they’d been given marching orders before they left the forest, and who would have been interested in doing something like that?

Any of the regional vampire lords, honestly. But this talk of some weapon in the hold, something powerful that vampires can turn against humans? No such thing exists. It’s bullshit. And the wards. The wards Sypha had promised them couldn’t be broken without her cooperation, without a piece of her to use to unravel the magic—and who would have access to—

This all feels feels wrong. It feels like a test, somehow—a game being played for no purpose other than to see how well they play it. 

Trevor’s tired of fucking games.

When they get close enough to pick out details by the torchlight, it’s clear these are the leftovers—maybe ten or so. The snow’s been melted away here, and they’re all battering on the stone slab, sloppy and uncoordinated, as if their goal were making a lot of noise rather than actually getting in. The motion stills as they pick up on the three approaching, heads whipping toward them like hounds on scent.

They don’t attack. They don’t move. A ripple of unease runs through them, tension pulled near to breaking, but something is holding them at heel.

Two figures step out from behind the broken wall towering over them all, clad in black armor trimmed in shining white. They’re vampires, obviously, but unlike the rest; their eyes are sharp, their posture straight, and they are so obviously in control of the situation that Trevor feels his lip curl back in an automatic snarl of challenge.

“Ah, here you are,” the larger of the two says, spreading his hands to either side, grinning with far too many teeth. Male, physically in his thirties perhaps, center of gravity a little on the low side. Local accent. “I didn’t think you were going to accept our invitation.”

The torchlight is playing havoc with the vampires’ features, making them monstrous in ways they normally aren’t—gargoyles, demons, revenants. Trevor ignores it, steps into the light, flanked by the people he trusts most in the world to cover his back. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, waving a hand in dismissal. “Drama drama posturing, veiled threat, _overt_ threat, I know the drill. Can we get to the part where you tell us what the fuck you’re doing here?”

“Oh, that’s simple. We need your blood.”

“Mine specifically.”

“Yours specifically,” the vampire confirms, crossing his arms over his armored chest, nodding to a tin bucket at his feet. What’s visible of his face is drawn into a smug grin. “How else are we supposed to get past this magical piece of stone?”

“You’re not going to,” Trevor says coolly.

“Over your dead body, am I right?”

“No,” Trevor says; he can feel Sypha and Adrian tensing to either side of him, can feel how barely in control Adrian is, blood on his hands from the last fight barely cooled and already ready for another. Sypha he can rely on, but Adrian—his restraint is a golden thread, poorly spun, fraying under its own tension. “Not even then.”

“I think you overestimate your role in this,” the vampire says, detached. “There’s more than one thing that can be done with blood like yours. In any event, my orders were clear: Alucard must be dead, and the Belmont must be _bled_.” His hand drifts to his belt, produces a keen-edged dagger, holds it out towards Trevor almost casually. “Now be a good bit of livestock—get on the hook and _bleed for me.”_

God, the sheer _theatricality_. Trevor knows that vampires are dramatic bastards, but this is over the top. And there’s something in there somewhere—maybe it’s the livestock jab, or maybe the notion that Trevor serves no greater purpose in this plot than as a magical ingredient to be used and discarded, or maybe just the gruesome imagery—but he can hear the thread of control holding Adrian in place give way with an audible _snap_. 

The next thing Trevor knows, the man at his right is little more than a blur of red light, reappearing with his sword drawn, the brilliant blade already flashing in descent, aimed for the vampire’s well-armored neck. He’s all predator in that moment, a dark avenging spirit, and his face—god, Trevor’s spent many hours trying to reconcile the Adrian he knows now with the Alucard that fought him below Greșit, and this is the closest he’s ever come to aggression and rage so pure.

But the sword clangs noisily off of the armor, a useless wasted shot that Adrian would never have taken were his mind unfogged. He winds up for another strike, and the vampire takes to the air to avoid it, an easy, easy dodge—and he’s grinning at Trevor all the while.

Yeah, this—this isn't good.

“Handle this, love?” the vampire sneers to the other armored form, and neither of them seem remotely worried, and that is—that is very fucking worrying, okay. Then the bastard takes off at speed, rushing through the air for the treeline. 

Adrian predictably gives chase, before either of them can say a word to stop him.

“Ah, fuck,” Trevor mutters, because some traps have multiple baits, multiple targets, and shit, _shit_, Adrian is walking right into this and he’s not a good enough fighter right now and he’s going to—

He’ll need help. Needs someone watching his back if he’s going to survive this _obvious fucking trap_. And the two in the woods will have better odds than whoever stays alone here. Trevor will give the two of them those odds, gladly. 

He turns to Sypha, hopes she can’t smell the thrice-damned selflessness on him. “Help him?”

At first, he thinks she’s going to refuse. There’s a long moment, her eyes boring into his, the fear of leaving him here alone warring with the fear of leaving Adrian to handle a risky fight on his own in his current mental state.

Then she nods, and presses her forehead to his, with the weight of everything unsaid—and there’s a rush of magical wind and he’s alone. 

With a pack of vampires. Who want his blood badly, for whatever good it’ll do them.

“All right,” he says, unhooking the Morning Star from his belt, letting loose a wicked grin. They want crazy, tonight? He can give them fucking crazy. He can show them how crazy is _done_. “Let’s see what you bastards’ve got.”

* *

The grass, the sky, blood pounding in his ears, then trees, brambles, thornbushes masked in snow, spindly tree branches catching on his sleeves like clawed fingers, like his own clawed fingers, and he’s going to tear this trespasser on his land apart for… for…

For...

For threatening to hurt Trevor. For threatening to _use_ Trevor like a dumb animal, for bringing a battle to his door that could have killed any of them, all of them.

Where _is_ Trevor? Where’s Sypha? Where, for that matter, is his quarry? He can smell vampire all around him—this must be where they camped for the day, the branches overhead woven thickly like a canopy, blocking out the moonlight now, blocking out the sunlight by day. 

He doesn’t think he’s ever been here, before. It doesn’t—it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except for his prey. He’s been holding this back all day, all night, this part of him that wants to feel the air splitting around his pursuit, wants to stalk from the inky shadows, wants to feel the death rattle between his teeth. It’s pulsing under his skin, pressing on him from the inside like it’s filled out every space, pushed everything else out and aside. 

He takes a deep breath through his nose, still cannot sort one scent from another. Too similar. Infuriating. 

“Show yourself!” he roars, sword hand shaking with adrenaline, with frustration, with rage.

Nothing. Not the rustle of undergrowth, not the scrape of treebark on treebark. Even the wind has stilled.

“What business,” he demands, schooling his voice, “do you have on my _fucking land?”_

“I think you’ll find that you stepped off your land a moment or two ago,” the voice comes from overhead, from everywhere at once, echoing strangely. Taunting. “Or is it the Belmont’s land? Either way, you’re in the night wilds now, _prince.”_

A scrap of lucid thought: his sword is scraping the ground, tearing up that same undergrowth, and the trees are so close he will never be able to swing it without hitting them first. He sheathes it, silent as a breath, and reaches for the shorter blade on his other hip; Trefor Gealbháin’s blade, a blade made for _killing vampires_. 

“Where are you,” he whispers, tuning all his senses, waiting.

* *

Here’s the thing. Ten totally feral vampires, versus a Belmont at the top of his game? He could always have screwed up, made a mistake, but barring that, Trevor would expect exactly the outcome he’s gotten: a lot of dead vampires.

But lucky number eleven isn’t feral. Isn’t fighting sloppily. Is armored, and Trevor’s gotten through armor like that before but it makes it harder, more drawn out. And adrenaline is a thing, but so is exhaustion. 

As the whip fails to connect for a third time straight, it occurs to him: he is very, very tired.

Tired from fighting all night, yes, but also tired from the weeks of tension and stress, tired from the years he’s spent guarding his life from forces that want to take it for no reason other than his name, and sure, it’s a good fight. It’s worth fighting for, all of it. But he’s still tired.

The mistake comes sooner than he expects.

* *

The forest is silent, silent. 

Then it isn’t, but even as far gone to the hunt as he is, he knows that the clumsy, roughshod approach he hears coming up behind him is a human, is likely either Trevor or Sypha. He takes a deep breath through his nose, nostrils flaring. Sypha.

When she reaches him, they can—

Oh, but she doesn’t get the chance. There’s a slight shift in the air, like the trees themselves holding their breath. Then a sudden weight hits his back, the weight of a bulky vampire and all of his armor with him, slamming into Adrian with such sheer momentum that it’s all he can do to hold onto his knife as he hits the ground.

Cold all down his back. Claws at his throat. A growl in his ear. Heat, blistering along the back of his neck, and screaming, and then the weight is gone.

Screaming. Heat…?

Sypha. She’s standing there at the edge of the clearing, fingers poised to cast again if needed, face set in a mask of stone. Merciless, as she should be.

Adrian has a split second to roll onto his back before the now-flaming vampire descends back onto him. It's quick work now, one arm between them to buy him some space, to jam the knife straight through a gap in the armor, angling for his heart, sliding it home with a satisfying ring as the crossguard hits the armor. Lethal in an instant, the hostile eyes going dull, blood drooling from his enemy's lips.

A second passes, two. He takes a long breath, steadying.

“Adrian,” Sypha whispers, fire dying as she darts to his side; he needs no help removing the weight of the corpse from his person now that he has leverage, and there are no other hostiles in the area. But her eyes are wide with a different kind of fear.

“Trevor,” he says back, and he says it like Trevor would say _shit_ or _fuck_, because her presence here has suddenly connected in his brain: Trevor is alone, back there.

She nods, biting her lip. A coolness runs through him, a sharp focus. 

They will have to move quickly.

* *

It’s just a moment’s miscalculation, really—he plants his foot a little too far to his outside, strains his center of balance for a moment, and that throws his attack wide, screws up his defense. And suddenly he’s being swept off his feet, grabbed up by the hair before he can hit the ground, spun and pressed to one of the still-standing walls with the vampire’s free arm binding both of his to his chest.

He still has the fucking Morning Star in his hand. He can’t do a _fucking thin_g with it.

Trevor shoots his gaze around the space, frantic. Adrian’s nowhere in sight. Sypha’s nowhere in sight. How long have they been gone? Where the hell is—his frame of vision jolts as the grip in his hair pulls hard to the side—where the _fuck _are they?

“Well, look at you,” the vampire at his back growls out, low and demeaning. He thinks it’s probably a female, from the voice and from the way the armor sits just a little slimmer on her frame—not that it matters worth a damn. Also local, from the sound of her voice. 

Then she noses in under Trevor’s collar, putting skin to skin, and his observational skills skitter sideways because, _fuck_. “All marked up and mapped out for me,” she continues, low and threatening. “That’ll make this easy.”

The grip is too solid, the angles all wrong for him to wrench his way free, and vampires are obviously strong but this is fucking _ridiculous._ This is the solstice at work; there’s never been a common vampire in the world who could hold a Belmont and yet here this one is, doing it effortlessly, her arm around both of his like an iron band. It’s like being held in place in a nightmare, the perfect immobility impossible and terrifying.

“That said, I don’t think anyone will blame me for sampling the spoils first.” She leans in closer and oh, oh fuck, he can feel her breath on his throat and it’s like he remembers from his earliest hunts, the sloppy ones that nearly got him killed—cold and creepy and damp, like a curl of cemetery fog. 

He kicks back, hard, sole of his boot slamming into her knee once, twice, three times, trying to collapse it. It doesn’t budge; she doesn’t even _react._

“You stink of consecration,” she hisses instead, pressing him harder against the wall, stealing his leverage. And for a second he thinks, okay, the _holy water _they’d all been doused in, he’s fucking saved—but Sypha dried it all off of them, damn her thoughtfulness, and the vampire drags her tongue up his neck with no hesitation, cool and disgusting and _violating_. “Don’t think you’ll taste like it, though.”

Okay. Okay, yeah, that’s enough. Trevor twists hard against the grip on his arms, kicks out at her again, throws his entire body into the motion, struggling with something close to panic because nothing else is _working._

Panic isn’t going to work, either. He knows that. Okay, fuck—if he can move enough to get some distance between his body and the wall, he can maybe get a foot up, push off of it, knock her off balance, or toe one of his boots off because his feet are still sopping wet in there, but she’s _armored_, shit, and _where the fuck are Sypha and Adrian_ and—

—and panic and planning both suddenly give way to more pain than he’s ever felt in his life.

It’s blinding, all-consuming, throbbing through his consciousness like it’s coming from everywhere at once, and it takes a second for the realization to hit: _oh dear god _he’s, he’s being _bitten,_ isn’t he, not like Adrian’s bites but like the bites all his ancestors died with, mutilated and drained and buried bloodless in that cemetery out back and there’s still a few plots left unclaimed, aren’t there? 

_Maybe I’m finally going to do something like a proper Belmont after all._

And it’s a seriously mind-expanding sort of pain—blazing, searing fucking agony, and more regret than his heart has room for, and more fear than he thought anyone could ever shake out of a Belmont’s bones. 

Time drips by, suddenly molasses-slow, letting him stew in all the awful, letting it really sink in.

Somewhere, an incoherent shout of denial.

* *

Sypha feels her eyes go wide as they approach the ruins at a dead run, the ground lit by guttering torches dropped where their owners fell, painting the two figures in flame-limned silhouette—but what’s going on, and the mortal danger Trevor’s in, is unmistakable. She hears herself shouting, hears Adrian too, though she’ll never remember the words. She’s got fire in her hands before she can blink, but she knows—in that slowed down, dilated way brains have of giving a person just enough time to realize how screwed they are, and no more—that they are too far away. She knows that in the time it will take for her fire to reach them, for Adrian to reach them, it will be too late.

_No_, she thinks helplessly, the wolf’s bloodied face hanging in her mind, even as she looses the volley of fireballs. _You can’t have him. He’s _ours.

The moment stretches, torturous: her fire growing smaller into the distance, Trevor jerking against his captor, the snow falling around them hanging frozen in space. 

Then out of nowhere, there’s _someone else_, shouting in frustration as they leap at a run from the uneven line of the ruined, crumbling wall. 

Time shatters back into its normal pace.

And whoever they are, they’re fast; they get there a second before Adrian does. They land noiselessly on the tiled ground right behind the vampire, all billowing white cloak and flashing silver sword, like a ghost, a spirit given form. And without any hesitation, they swing that sword, whipping a deep, hard slash across the vampire’s back—right through the armor, impossibly sharp and with impossible strength behind it, metal screaming against metal. There’s a grinding sound like bone splintering, Sypha notes abstractly, as the vampire’s legs go out beneath it—a spray of too-dark blood, arcing through the air and hanging there for a drawn-out, impossible moment, like a spiderweb, like lace. 

She remembers herself, remembers her fireballs, just in time to pull them back.

But they get close first, casting light, and when she catches a glimpse of the features beneath the hood—just a glancing impression of a chin, a mouth, shadow where eyes should be—she thinks she’s never seen a face as ripcord-tight and contorted with rage as what she’s seeing right now.

* *

He’s not going to scream. He’s _not going to scream._ That’s what she wants, wants to break him, wants to hear the last Belmont wail and beg and cry for his life.

_Never give them what they want_, his mother’s voice in his head. It’s been a long time. _Whether it’s man or beast. The second you do, you’re dead._

He’s dead anyway. He knows this. But there’s also something to be said for just being _fucking contrary _to the very end.

Trevor’s whole world is pain, though—a sensorium dominated by misery. He can’t even feel the unyielding coolness of the broken stone wall against his chest, or hear the approaching clamor, or feel the thudding of his heart in his ears. But when there’s a sudden hard, jolting impact driving the monster’s body against his, the fangs pulling free as a hiss of agony bleeds over his shoulder and the grip on his arms goes lax, _that_ he notices; what’s more, his body knows how to react, how to take advantage of it even if his mind is blasted to pieces by pain.

He swings his head back hard, gracelessly slamming the back of his skull into the vampire’s face; their bones are harder than his, but their noses are still pure cartilage.

A wet, crunching sound, and the wailing goes gurgly and damp—and as Trevor bucks to get himself free, she slumps away from him, grappling with his arms as if she needs _his _support to stay upright. She goes down hard, and Trevor doesn’t know exactly what’s going on but he isn’t going to question it. He drops down on top of his assailant, twisting as quickly as he can to free a loop of the Morning Star’s chain and get it slipped up underneath the helm’s edge, pinned across the creature’s throat like a garrote.

The vampire just gurgles now, too confused or too injured to do much except claw at her throat where the consecrated silver is burning the flesh. Acrid smoke curls up into the air and blood bubbles up and boils as it hits the surface, turning black in the moonlight. 

“I’ve got him covered,” he hears Sypha say, at a distance. She sounds steely and unforgiving. 

She’s also too far away for Trevor to care who she’s talking about. He grits his teeth, leans into the hold, driving the chain harder into the thing’s throat. “Thought you had an easy snack, huh?” he snarls, hissing through his teeth. “You’d just pop in, get my blood and go?”

“Belmont,” Adrian says from somewhere above him, and oh, _now_ the fucker decides to show up, and he’s probably going to be really pissy about Trevor getting himself bitten but Trevor isn’t the one who decided to run off and—

“Yeah?” Trevor growls, instead of saying any of the rest of it.

“Don’t kill her,” that wavery voice says—and oh, really? We’re being pacifist about this _now_? The adrenaline is rattling through Trevor’s veins, phantom pain and real pain and all the fear of the last weeks and days and _minutes_ making it hard to see straight, but Adrian continues: “She’s the only one left alive, and we need to know what this was about.”

God damn it. God _damn it_, he’s right. “Fine,” Trevor grits, “then get your arse down here and _help me hold her_. I can’t do it myself without using the chain.”

Instead, Adrian just reaches down and takes the dying vampire’s forehead in his hand, and slams her head back against the stone tile with enough force to shatter a human skull. In this case, with the helm in the way, it’s just enough to knock her out. Which. Okay, that’s fine. That works. Trevor lifts the chain away, grimaces at how it comes away with stringy bits of burnt flesh still clinging to it.

“Augh, gross,” he says, rolling back onto the ground, landing hard on his arse. He shakes the chain ineffectually, trying to get it to shed its hanger-ons; it rattles and clanks loudly in what is, suddenly, a very quiet space.

“Trevor,” Adrian says, urgent sounding but distant.

“Seriously, this is disgusting.”

“_Trevor.”_

Trevor looks up, sees exactly what he’d been hoping to avoid seeing by fussing over his weapon instead: Adrian looks _gutted_, terrified and panicked, isn’t bothering to hide a speck of it. He looks like he’d been thrown face-first into a shitheap of grief and is only just starting to work his way back to fresh air.

Beyond him, Sypha is holding a fireball at the ready, covering an indistinct figure in a white hooded cloak, bloody sword hanging from their fingers. Sypha looks furious, an avenging angel. The figure doesn’t look like any of Isabel’s people. Trevor narrows his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Adrian asks, blocking his view as he drops into a crouch. The words are bland and quiet for how scared he obviously is, like he doesn’t dare risk any emotion lest it cascade into a breakdown.

Christ. Okay. Trevor doesn’t _think_ he’s bleeding out, but Adrian clearly needs a demonstration before he’ll let him deal with the Mysterious Stranger. So he reaches up to run the back of his hand over the most painful spot on his neck; regards it in front of his face for a second, feels his vision start to tunnel. Oh, that’s… that’s actually quite a bit of blood, isn’t it? But nowhere near as much as there’d be if she’d gotten to an artery; it’s not _gushing_. 

“Yeah,” he says, a little unsteady. “Yeah, I think so. Don’t think she hit anything important.”

There’s a noise, then, that sounds like it was kicked right out of Adrian’s lungs—a quiet, desperate little misery moan, all tangled up in breath. He’s suddenly more in Trevor’s space, hands sliding up both sides of his neck and fingers resting on his jawline, turning his head side to side to see for himself. It’s tender and all, Adrian being delicately cautious with him, but for the first time in his life, Trevor thinks he understands what creatures mean when they say they can smell fear. Right now, Adrian is a pungent, reeking ball of terror.

“For god’s sake,” the dhampir says, nearly a whisper, shaking his head and pressing something made of cloth to the stinging, bruised-feeling stretch of skin and muscle. He’s just trying to stop the bleeding, but holy shit, ow; Trevor knows he’s going to be black and blue from his shoulder to his ear by morning. “I thought she had your _throat_ out. How could you let it get that far?”

“I couldn’t break the hold,” Trevor says, just as quiet. “They’re too strong, tonight. Stronger than I realized. We never—we always waited ‘til a few days after before we went hunting...”

“We _knew_ they were going to be stronger, you insisted you could avoid being grabbed in the first place—”

“I _did _have a plan,” Trevor feels the need to assert, no matter that it’s only halfway true. “I would have gotten loose on my own.”

“You had a plan,” Adrian repeats after him, skeptical.

“I did! I was going to kick off the wall and knock her on her blood-drunk arse.” His voice feels weak even to him—he’s having trouble catching his breath. “With my holy water-soaked socks. Would have been impressive.”

Adrian considers, looking between Trevor and the unconscious body. At some point, sheer size and bulk can come into play, even with vampires—especially if said vampire is all fucked up on bloodlust and the issue is one of _balance_, of angles and leverage. But they both know that it wouldn't have worked.

He shakes his head, turns back to Trevor, smiling lightly. “It’s not your most brilliant approach.”

Trevor laughs, leans into the hand on his neck, leans into Adrian’s space. “Better than sucker-punching Dracula.”

“Yes,” Adrian says, ducking to brush his lips against Trevor’s, just a whisper of contact, as if he doesn’t trust himself to endure more. “Your desperate, doomed-to-failure plans have, indeed, improved.”

* *

Sypha watches the hooded figure carefully, hand coming up between them with fire gathering in her fingers—and for a second, the light from the flame casts a warm glow under the hood and she’s sure she sees a shimmer of red and blue deep in the shadows, a curl of gold, a bright white glint of fang. Vampire. More than that—blue eyes, white cloak. The wolf?

Then the snarl she’d seen disappears under a mask of serenity, mouth smoothing into a calm line. She can hear a single deep breath, drawn and released, slow. Centering.

“There’s no need for that,” the stranger says finally, voice clear and youthful and somehow endearing, with an even cadence and the faintest lingering French accent. He sheathes his sword, a whisper of metal. “I just saved him. What sense would it make to harm any of you now?” 

Sypha narrows her eyes into the glow of the flame, feels her own lip curl. Does he think they’re all stupid? Or just her? “Perhaps you simply want to be the one to claim credit,” she says, keeping her tone cool, flat. “Perhaps there is something you need from him first. There are many reasons I can think of.”

Somewhere behind her, she can hear Adrian’s and Trevor’s voices both, quiet cursing and quiet reassurance, so she is reasonably certain that Trevor will live. That certainty, and the resultant sense of indebtedness, is what currently stays her hand. “You cannot expect us to believe,” she continues despite that, “that you are the only vampire in all of creation who does _not_ wish to see the end of the Belmont line.”

He shifts his gaze, looks beyond her to where Adrian is fussing over Trevor, then has the audacity to laugh—but it isn’t the gloating sort of thing she expects. It sounds like a helpless sort of laughter, as if the stranger has simply become overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation.

It reminds her of Trevor’s laugh. She keeps her hand up between them, refusing to be disarmed by it.

“I know that it makes no sense to you,” he says, laughter still in his voice, shot through with frustration. “And I’d never claim to be the only one—you had other allies, tonight. But I _would _prefer the family survived, yes.”

“Why?” Trevor asks from behind her, deceptively mild; out of the corner of her eye, she can see him pulling himself to his feet, one hand on Adrian’s arm. His other hand is pressed tightly to the side of his neck, one of Adrian’s white silk handkerchiefs rapidly turning red beneath his fingers. His gaze is hazy, but intent.

The figure takes a measured step toward them. Sypha lets the flame in her hand flare up in warning, and as the light it casts increases, she notices the same things she did before—red in the eyes, teeth too prominent to be human. But she notices something else, too.

“What reason could you _possibly_ have to give a shit about—”

“Trevor, stop,” Sypha says, because the extra light is picking out what she couldn’t have seen before—pale blue stitching over both shoulders of the man’s cloak, faded by time, almost washed out enough to match the white all around it. Stitching in the shape of a very, very familiar crest, with its curled, swooping lines and emblazoned cross.

Gloved hands reach up to the edges of the hood, presumably to peel it back, to do away with all the secrecy and shadows—

—and Sypha has the sudden feeling of being on a wagon careening towards a sheer dropoff, the horses wild with fright, the trajectory devastatingly inevitable. Something is about to happen that will, she is sure, change everything, and she wants more than anything to pause time, to slow it down, to draw out this moment before the cliff’s edge for as long as she can.

She holds her breath. 

Time does not stop.

The face under the hood, when it’s revealed, is as young-looking as the voice had sounded; fine-featured, delicate almost, a warmth in his expression to make up for the chilled pallor of his skin. There’s only a faint rim of red around otherwise luminous blue eyes—no more wild than Adrian’s, at the moment—and they’re framed by a boyish mess of pale golden hair, all flyaways and disobedient curls.

Beside her, she hears Trevor pull a sharp breath; then he swears again, long and creative, shock crowded out by disbelief. Denial.

And Sypha knows all at once that this cannot be her wolf, cannot be the danger her dream foretold—because she _knows_ that face, has seen it before, has watched Trevor’s gaze drift to it without thinking, seeking approval or reassurance or _something_, every single time they’ve gone down into the hold.

“I have good reason to be invested,” says the first of the Belmont hunters—the one who swore their oath, who built their home, who dedicated their legacy to battling the night—to his sole surviving descendant.

*

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_Art by [JustSayApples](https://justsayapple.tumblr.com/)!!!_

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . .


	8. Chapter 8

*

So, there are these things that need to be done, and Trevor keeps himself together impressively well under the circumstances, if he’s allowed to say so himself. Every now and then Adrian hands him a new handkerchief and he hands the old one back, and it would be reassuringly procedural if it weren’t for the progressively guiltier and more worried silences that slip between them with each exchange. Yes, silences can be loaded down with complicated emotion, something Trevor finds a lot easier to recognize when he’s just this side of loopy, and Adrian’s silences right now are the weightiest Trevor thinks he’s ever encountered.

Isabel’s people have been put up for the day. They’ve been up to the study, so that Sypha could briefly contact her grandfather—she’s fine, they’re all fine, but she’ll be staying here a little longer—and Adrian could shutter and bolt the windows. Trevor impulsively left a handful of honeyed oats he found stuffed in a belt pouch, trail food from ages ago, for the pigeon still hiding in the rafters—she’s earned some regard, he figured in his woozy state, for having brought them Sypha’s message just barely in time. Without it, they would have been too overwhelmed fighting to get the mirror open, and without Sypha…

It doesn’t bear considering, honestly.

Isabel and Adrian and… and the fucking ghost of Belmonts past, apparently, have compared creepy vampire notes and are in agreement that there are no more hostiles in the upper levels of the castle. Down in the dungeon, the dungeon he hadn’t actually known was down there but probably should have guessed about, the vampire soldier that had nearly killed him is locked up unconscious behind magically hardened steel, stripped of her armor and weapons and honestly a bit of a fucking mess, though Adrian assures them she’ll heal up well enough to talk.

After all, she is currently _extremely_ well fed.

His neck throbs, a nauseating blend of pain and burning and unnamable _wrongbad_, and Trevor has never felt as stripped of his defenses, as utterly vulnerable as he’d been in those short moments with her teeth in his throat—and he sort of wishes he’d been allowed to kill her, no matter their need for information. 

And they’re just doing one last sweep of the main hall to check for anything they’ve missed, at Adrian’s insistence—Trevor suspects it’s just restless paranoia, really—when the exhaustion starts to really demand his attention.

God, he needs to sleep. Or pass out. One or the other, and he’s to the point where he doesn’t even care about the distinction.

They should be safe to sleep, he figures. No vampires in the castle—well, no vampires he has to worry about. Dawn’s coming on soon. There’s even someone conveniently available to keep watch while those of them that actually spent all night fighting get some rest, even if that someone—

Ugh. Okay. So, this is a thing—every time he is reminded that _apparently_ one of his ancient supposedly dead relatives wound up on the wrong end of a vampire at some point and is currently _standing right here,_ having done mundane helpful things like carrying their captive for them while Adrian and Sypha were occupied keeping Trevor upright, and being chivalrous with doors, and even just _being Leon fucking Belmont_, Trevor’s headache doubles in intensity. It’s happened about three times now. He thinks maybe his brain is attempting to shut itself down out of self-preservation.

Or that—that could be the blood loss. But it’s also just ordinary exhaustion, confusion, shock. Not everything is about blood, blood isn’t _everything._

Trevor presses a hand to the bridge of his nose, squeezes hard. Watches as Adrian scans the space again, making absolutely certain that there’s no lurking danger, then closes his eyes against the pounding in his skull just—just for a second—

—grey, grey fuzzy warm, cool around the edges, heartbeat in his ears too fast and shallow, just a flutter under his skin, and buzzing buzzing buzzing—

“—what I thought was going to happen.” Sypha’s voice, worried and exasperated, somewhere extremely nearby but distorted, like he’s hearing it from underwater. There’s a sharp, high ringing in his ears, and he can feel arms under his, fighting against the gravity that’s pulling him down into a sag. He hears Sypha grunt with the strain of holding him upright, hears someone sigh, feels a sharp burn on the side of his neck when Adrian changes out the handkerchief there for a fresh one. 

“Set him down,” Adrian’s voice, hollow and woven into that ringing, and then there’s something solid under him, but his equilibrium isn’t what it usually is and up and down are both sort of moving targets. The world lurches, dizzying.

“‘I’m fine’, he says,” Sypha complains, though there’s still more worry there than anything else.

“Trevor,” Adrian says, quiet, almost like he’s trying to be discreet, though Trevor doesn’t know what the damn point of _that_ is; his erstwhile ancestor has ears like a fucking bat. Because. He is a bat. Kind of. Oh _god_, this is so fucked up. “We need to get you bandaged up.”

“What, here?” Trevor asks, pushing his hair out of his face, straightening up against the vertigo as best he can.

“Evidently, yes,” Adrian answers. “As this is where your ability to lie to us about your condition has run out.”

“I’m not _lying_.”

“Protecting us, then. Either way, you’ve gone through four handkerchiefs and that’s my limit for pretending everything is fine. So let’s just get you taken care of, yes?”

Trevor looks up at Adrian, squints a little, because there’s a glow lingering around his hair, his pale face, that has nothing to do with the overhead lights. It could just be his vision going strange, but it feels like more than that, and it isn’t the sort of thing he expects it to be, doesn’t feel like purity or goodness or warmth. It’s like if pain and guilt and regret all got wrapped up in layers of love, love that barrels on recklessly even when shown its own repercussions but never quite masks the rest of it.

Sypha is next to him, a steadying hand on his shoulder, warm in ways he hadn’t even realized he’d missed so much. It seeps through him like sunlight on bare skin, her very presence a balm.

And across the landing, that amorphous figure in white, facing away with his arms up on the banister—giving them privacy, maybe, but also gazing down over the entry hall with the introspective, fragile sort of calm of someone finding themselves somewhere they never thought they’d be. Uncharted waters.

“Yeah, fine,” Trevor breathes finally, ducking his head so that he can stop looking at anything in particular, so that he can stop _thinking_. “Do what you need to.”

So Adrian sends Sypha off to get him some water mixed with a little sugar and salt—he’d rather have some ale, really, but he’s not stupid enough to think that’s actually a good idea—and Adrian goes off to fetch his bandages and smelly salves and whatever else he decides to bring to the party.

Which leaves him alone with—okay. With _Leon_. Step one: actually think his name. Maybe step two will be saying it out loud.

He regards the man’s back for a long moment, trying to unravel this in his head—there’s something significant here that hasn’t connected, and he can’t figure out what it is—until the effort sends his vision blurry again, makes his head spin, and he’s forced to set his head in his knees and just wait for his friends to return.

* *

Adrian sorts through his supplies in numb silence. Bandages, boiled and pre-soaked in salve. One of the strangely luminescent, deep blue potions they’d brought up from the hold. A needle and thread that he hopes he won’t need. 

He wouldn’t need _any_ of this, if he had been able to keep his composure, down there in the ruins. Trevor wouldn’t be sitting down in the hall slowly but steadily bleeding out. He wouldn’t have needed the intervention of a stranger to save him. Well. Not a stranger, perhaps, but certainly not who the rescue should have fallen to. And god, how close had _he_ come to hurting Trevor the same way, earlier in the night? What business does he even _have_, pretending to be a protector?

Adrian braces his hands on either edge of the worktable, lets his face dip toward the surface, hair falling into his eyes and scattering itself across the pale wood in chaotic whorls.

Trevor’s going to need help with this. Not just tonight, not just with his injuries. He’s going to need support and reassurance in a thousand ways, and he’s going to need _them_ to be there for him. This is no time for Adrian to make it about himself, about his own guilt and fault and blame. He has already done enough damage; he will not allow his own selfishness make it worse.

* *

Sypha is getting back from the kitchen around the same time Adrian is returning from his workroom, and she catches his elbow at the edge of the hall, out of Trevor’s earshot.

“This is why he was acting so oddly with the water earlier, isn’t it?” she asks, no longer able to ignore the elephant in the room but seemingly not willing to subject Trevor to her thoughts directly.

Adrian sighs, looks across at Trevor’s slumped form. “I think it explains a lot, yes.”

“Do you think he—”

“No.” Of this, Adrian’s certain; otherwise they’d be dealing with an overt meltdown. “I don’t think he’s put it together yet. Probably assuming this happened much later—if he’s thinking about it at all.”

A long pause, then Sypha shakes her head. “I do not think we should point it out. Not tonight, at least.”

“Agreed,” Adrian says; the depth of the relief in his voice surprises him. He’d been a little worried she was going to push for _the truth_, no matter its consequences, but they both know this is a truth that will willingly emerge on its own, and timing is important.

“I just don’t think he—Trevor!” Sypha shouts, turning to dart over to where Trevor is suddenly slumping off to his side, threatening to slip off the stairs entirely.

They get there quickly, but by the time they do, the other Belmont has already moved to intervene, crouching and catching Trevor up by the shoulders, steadying him, peering into his face as if for signs of concussion.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Trevor’s mumbling, irritated—the first words he’s spoken directly to his ancestor in over an hour. “Bet you weren’t doing any better when _you_ got bit.”

“A lot worse, actually,” the man says with a chuckle, then looks up to Adrian and Sypha, wordlessly asking whether he should stay there or get out of their way. “But there were… other things going on at the time.”

“I bet there fucking were.”

“Trevor,” Adrian says, to draw his attention. He settles down on the step next to him, folding a long bandage into a square big enough to cover the wound, noticing the way Trevor’s eyes drunkenly follow every movement of his hands. He considers, then reaches for the potion, uncorks it one-handed. They’re not for drinking, the notes near the bottles had insisted, with lots of capital letters and underlining for emphasis; they’re for superficial wounds only, and Adrian figures their purpose had been to close up minor injuries in the field before the scent of blood drew the wrong sort of attention. Soaking a dressing in one should probably help, here. “I have no idea if this is going to sting or not.”

“Everything hurts anyway,” Trevor slurs, with a sarcastic cheerfulness. “What’s a little more matter?”

He still hisses though, when Adrian removes the bloodied handkerchief and replaces it with the faintly blue, wet square of bandage—clenches his jaw, eyes fluttering closed. But he doesn’t pull away, and it’s quick work to get the rest of the bandages wrapped around it, holding it cleanly in place.

He’ll give the potion a chance to work, Adrian thinks, before he resorts to trying to sew things up. It’s only a vein that she hit, that much is obvious, but it’s still a large vein and one that can be torn open easily; he’s always been so delicately careful with it, when he—when he and Trevor—

A sudden rush of nausea, his stomach flipping over on itself at the very _notion_ that they’d made such a habit of it, that they’d made a thrilling game of the inherent danger. That this is only one of many bite scars that Trevor’s going to be bearing on his skin. It had felt so… so _innocent_, before, just another way for them to enjoy themselves and each other. Smoothing the bandage’s edges with his thumb, Adrian is not sure he’ll ever see it that way again.

He hears Sypha offering Trevor the tankard of water, hears him complain jokingly about it not being as good for the constitution as ale is. Watches Sypha leave him to it, as she turns to Leon Belmont, now standing a few feet away, and asks him quietly to _stay_, tells him that keeping watch aside, Trevor will have questions when he wakes up, questions that his sanity will demand answers to.

“Of course,” comes the hushed reply, without a second’s hesitation. “I never wanted him to have to deal with this in the first place—I’m not going to drop it on him and run.”

_It_, Adrian thinks. The _it_ that Trevor is not acknowledging, the piece of the puzzle that’s always been missing.

After they sleep. They’ll deal with it then.

“Come on,” Adrian says, threading his arm under Trevor’s, giving him as much support as he can as he hauls him back up to his feet. He can feel Trevor’s heartbeat even through his back, thudding wild and fast between his shoulder blades, doing the best it can with what blood his body still has. He’s breathing too quickly, too; everything points to him being terrifyingly close to the point of no return, in terms of blood volume, and Adrian suppresses a shudder. “We’ll get you up to your room, and you can sleep this off.”

“Only if—” Trevor starts, then cuts himself off, whatever salacious promise he’d been about to ask for dying shiveringly behind his teeth. He presses his eyes closed against the disequilibrium—and they have company, after all. “Never mind. Yeah. Sleep sounds great.”

* *

When they get to their room—_theirs_, not _Trevor’s_, thank you very much—Trevor just collapses face-first into the dawn-smeared light puddling lush and bright in the blankets. The sheets are dark, and when Sypha sits to join him, she can feel the way they’ve been soaking up warmth from the early sunlight.

Adrian disappears for a moment, comes back with more water; they prop Trevor up and force him to drink it, then help him with his boots, with his mantle and weapon belts. He’s asleep before they even manage to get in alongside him, one leg still sticking out from under the covers, hands clenched around the blanket at his chin.

So much will have to be done, when they wake. So much will have to be addressed. So much could change, no matter how diligently they run damage control.

There’s still something wonderful, Sypha thinks—never mind the smell of blood and salve and sweat and fire, and the fact that Trevor feels cool and shivery where she’s tucked him against her chest, and the fact that Adrian has been too, too quiet—about piling the heavy down blankets over all of them, and wrapping herself around them, and knowing that for once, for one sleep, she does not have to worry about bloody-faced wolves and danger in the dark. There is only her, and her lovers, and the warmth they have found in each other’s arms, and the sunlight spilling over them like a promise of safety, always.

* *

The castle is remarkably quiet. There’s a dripping noise, from somewhere far away. A faint mechanical whirr, deep in the walls. But otherwise: quiet.

He’s only been here once before, granted, and that was a very long time ago. It was a different place, then—full of chaos and danger, spirits boiling out of every open door, demons and huge, looming beasts, skeletons stripped of all their flesh but still, impossibly, shambling closer with every second. A place of regrets and vengeance thwarted and near-tragedy, barely averted.

Now: all is silence. Peaceful. Calm. Like a tomb—and he knows that in some ways, that’s precisely what it is. But it’s also a haven, a respite, an eye in the storm that even now churns on, out the wider world.

In truth, it isn’t even really silent; the whole building thuds dully with the background noise of a dozen overlapping, somnolent heartbeats. But it’s quiet, distant, easy to ignore. He sits here on the stairs, sword propped up against his side, and for a moment it’s like any long watch he’s ever taken.

Then there’s a scuffing noise from somewhere off to the left. There shouldn’t really be any new noises—he’s alone here in the entry hall, a solitary sentinel. It’s safe enough with all the windows shuttered but there’s still something eerie about a space this vast so completely empty. The noise is small, unobtrusive, but he still locates and tracks it without thought: it’s a small creature, wandering blithely in from one of the side halls—some sort of necromantic construct that used to be a dog, and that’s the kind of monster he’d been expecting to find in here. But it doesn’t seem aggressive—just trots up to him and whines anxiously, and it’s a horribly disfigured thing but it lays its head on his leg like he’s _not_ a total stranger, completely trusting. So whatever it is, it probably doesn’t need slaying.

“Demanding little undead atrocity, aren’t you?” he mumbles, indulging a smile, burying his claws in the fur at the base of its ear and scratching lightly there. Loses himself a little in the repetitive motion, in the soothing tactility of it. Loses himself, one careful fragment at a time, to the pull of memory.

* *

[The hold is a disaster of blood and scorch marks and dead demons, necromantic monsters all, the entire staircase obliterated. But none of that prepares him for the sight that greets him at the top of the pit: his home, the home he built for his family, burned and shattered and in ruins, dark violet flowers twining over the broken walls like ornamentation on gravestones. First disbelief, and shock—then the sheer agony of it hits him like a spike in the gut, the wetness sticky on his cheeks, when he realizes that this happened years ago, a decade or more ago, and no one came back to rebuild. Which means that no one—]

[Sara’s eyes, laughing in the sunlight the day they met, then wide and trusting in the dark, trusting him to free her from this fate worse than death. Bitterness for years after that—because she, at least, had had someone to do that for her, while Leon—]

[“Grandfather, _please_,” Annalee growls, and he knows that she won’t have breath to speak soon, not with how tightly his hands are clenched around her throat—and he must stop, he _must_ release her, there is no other possible outcome. His hands _must_ obey him. But over her shoulder Mathi—_Dracula_ looms, lord of the castle, controlling his will through the blood that connects them like he’s plucking the strings of a lute. And he isn’t even gloating, isn’t cackling maniacally, looks nothing so much as resigned. But his grip on Leon’s mind doesn’t falter, and in front of Leon, his beautiful grandchild’s lips start to go blue—]

[“I would never use it,” the soft, lilting voice says, a glint of silver in the dark, the flash of a blue stone, and Leon is seized by fear for his friend’s life because he _must_, he must use it, if Leon loses control, loses _himself_—]

[If he’s a danger to everyone, is it really suicide? It cannot still be a sin, to kill a monster that just happens to share his skin—]

[“You’re his true heir,” she says, catlike and predatory, claws clicking on the wall beside her, “Not that spoiled child,” but all he can think is that he isn’t the heir to anything, that even the inheritance he meant for his children has been destroyed. She will not stop saying it, though, until he loses his composure completely, threatens to chew her tongue out if she won’t still it, and then she just smirks at him like she’s already won—]

[Exhaustion and urgency warring in him, the inertia of bones at rest resisting the mind’s instructions to get up, get up, it’s time to get up, he’s dead, you have nothing to fear now. And it’s pitch black when he opens his eyes and so he stays there, sipping at sustenance in the dark, until the silence beyond these cramped walls is complete enough that he knows it’s safe to come out—]

[He has no need for breath, has not for many years, but he still feels it stolen from his chest when he catches a glimpse of the travelers come to the castle, months later, and one of them is wearing his crest and thank God, thank the God he knows has abandoned him, that his family yet lives, that their home may yet be rebuilt—]

[Month by month the timbers of his house go up, and the earth is moved from below it, all the work done by moonglow; for the first half-year it feels like an exercise in futility, just a tremendous tomb he’s building for himself. He had made such noises about a family, about a legacy, about a bloodline raised to hunt the night, but who would ever want to live in a home never kissed by sunlight? 

Then one night, Aurelia is there, sweet sad Aurelia from the village, too fond of books and boy’s games and never proper enough for her family’s liking. She’s carrying a bundle of night phlox, scent of vanilla and honey threading through the still, cool air to reach him where he’s perched in the highest rafters, hammer in hand. She’s here out of sheer kindness for the lonely outcast, the sort of compassion that had led Sara to surrender her life for the safety of uncountable others, and there’s a twinge under his ribs, where his heart no longer beats. And he _swore_, he swore he would never forget Sara, would never replace her, would not allow his life to go on as if she had never been a part of it. But months go by and the visits continue and that isn’t how it works anyway, is it? People aren’t interchangeable blocks; Aurelia will never take Sara’s place any more than Sara took _his_ place—]

[“This isn’t right,” he protests as he always does, but there’s never an argument he makes that he really means, and so Mathias has learned not to listen to him—not now, not with the day’s battle behind them and the screams of the dying still fresh in their ears and the warmth of Mathias’s hands under his tunic the only thing in the entire world that says, unequivocally: you’re alive, _you’re alive_—

“This isn’t what makes men heretics,” Mathias soothes, breath warm against Leon’s ear. “It’s hatred and despair and grief that does—and what is this, but the opposite of that?”]

* *

Adrian lies in bed, sprawled along Trevor’s back, not sleeping. He rolls the heavy, dark stone of Sypha’s between his fingers, finding the indentations without trouble, worrying at them and twisting the sphere’s starry depths against the sunlight. She’d been awake for a bit after Trevor passed out—exhausted they all are, but only Trevor is so drained as to overcome the adrenaline still boiling under their skin—and when he’d quietly asked about her trip, the knowledge she’d sought, she’d only yawned and handed this to him, and said that she was _working on it._

It’s a very pretty stone, he supposes. And he can smell the dark magic on it, just a touch, deep in its core. But it isn’t unnerving or weighty, it doesn’t resonate with him in the way he imagines it does for her. 

The window glass is closed but unshuttered, letting the light of day fill the room. It should make it easier for him to sleep, not harder, but—

It isn’t adrenaline keeping him up, not anymore. He’d started this night possessed of a frantic, crawling restlessness that had caused him to make one mistake after another, but once he’d come into view of the ruins and had seen Trevor being _killed in front of them_, it’d been like being dropped into an icy lake—dropped in, and held down, until the light of the surface had faded from view and all that was left was cold and dark and suffocating and _empty_. It had quenched that wild rush of instinct right out of his system, left him shaky and floundering in its absence.

No, it’s the guilt that’s keeping his mind awake now, spinning around and back on itself, an anxious chewing over of everything that happened tonight and everything he could have done differently. And he knows that he cannot make this about him, not when Trevor needs him, but right now—in their bed, with his lovers asleep and the crisis past and no one having any need of his strength—he lets himself feel it, feel the depth of his failure, feel the intensity of the grief he’d almost brought on himself—

The tears are silent, when they come. This is an indulgence, and he will not wake them.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Trevor's not... really processing things very well right now. It isn't his fault. His scholar and his soldier will take good care of him.
> 
> Interesting fact! Loss of just 40% or so of your blood volume is basically 'you dead soon' territory if there isn't a transfusion ready to go. People tend to think a vamp would need to drain you dry to kill you but NOPE! Hemodynamic instability and hypovolemic shock will do you in just as quickly. Trevor isn't QUITE there, but he's too close for Adrian's comfort.
> 
> Also: Leon's memory snippets are not supposed to 100% make sense yet, so don't worry if they've raised more questions. We'll get there.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooooooo this chapter assumes some knowledge of the events of Lament of Innocence. I totally recognize that most people haven't played this game; neither have I! But there are transcripts of the dialogue available out there and there are videos of all the cutscenes available on youtube, and I'd recommend that if you know NOTHING about the story, you at least give something like that a glance, or a lot of this will... it probably won't make so little sense as to be confusing, but it definitely won't have the impact it should.

*

To say that he cannot sleep is too mild, and eventually, Adrian gives up on trying—peels himself out of the blankets carefully, not letting any of the trapped body heat escape. He stands at the bedside for a long moment, watching both of them breathe, listening to their heartbeats. Trevor’s still running a bit faster than Sypha on all fronts, but nothing like he was before, and the cadence is steady. The water must have helped.

It’s easily midday. He could go out, go running as a wolf or as a man, let the cold and the drag of the snow and the high, harsh sun wear him down until he can’t help but sleep. 

Instead, he wanders down to the main hall. There’s no real intention behind it; it’s almost muscle memory more than anything, feet moving in one direction while his mind wanders in others. But when he gets there, the two are forced back together at the sight of the white-cloaked figure seated at the edge of the landing. Lazar is there too, is soliciting attention shamelessly, head upon the Belmont progenitor’s leg as if he were just another visitor—but then, a dog’s understanding of these complexities is limited, and Adrian imagines it was a stressful night for him, too.

“Can’t sleep?” comes the question, quiet, betraying no agenda. Just a question.

Which, Adrian supposes, deserves an answer as straightforward. “No.”

“A lot happened, tonight. It’s understandable.” The Belmont yawns, betraying his own difficulty being awake this time of day; between the fangs and the hair he really does look vaguely leonine. A more appropriate name than those who gave it to him ever anticipated.

And for a long moment, Adrian just looks at him, thinking. That was clearly an invitation, a _ do you want to talk about it _ of sorts, which feels disorienting coming from a stranger. But then, if he’s been leaving them messages and was here tonight to intervene, he might have been _watching_, too; might know them better than they know him. It’s an uncomfortable thought.

Another uncomfortable thought: there are creatures in the world adept at shapeshifting, and there are casters of very convincing illusions.

“Why now?” Adrian finally asks, because it has been bothering him, and because if this is nothing but a cruel hoax, he will put an end to it before it can get its claws into them.

“Pardon?”

Adrian takes a few steps down to the landing. “Why reveal yourself _now?”_

Belmont turns, looks up at him for a long, considering moment, then shrugs. “I didn’t have a choice, did I? Trevor was in trouble, and it didn’t look like the two of you were going to get there in time.”

Adrian ignores that, for the moment. It doesn’t feel like it was meant to be an insult. “No, I simply mean… why did you never come to us _before_ now?”

A sigh, evasive. “I think you know how badly he’s going to take this,” Belmont says, regret clear in his voice, one hand fidgeting restlessly with the pale blue trim of his cloak. “Once he figures it out. It was kept secret for good reason.”

Trevor’s inherent distrust of Isabel and her people; his immediate distrust of Adrian himself. Disrespectful jokes about bloodletting, about turning him into shoes, and Trevor’s left a lot of that behind but he’s already hard enough on himself, isn’t he?

“And that reason is?” Adrian pushes, rather than acknowledge it.

“It is very hard to hunt something when you know that something is a part of you.”

It isn’t flippant. It isn’t overly dramatic. It’s a practical truth, and Adrian becomes keenly aware in this moment that he’s standing before a vampire who has spent several lifetimes killing his own kind, who engineered an entire legacy to _ keep _ hunting them for countless generations. Who knows _ exactly _ how hard it is. Who feels no need to even get up from where he’s sitting, in the face of Adrian’s aggression—not out of disrespect, but because he simply _ isn’t afraid of him. _

“And that was good enough reason,” Adrian asks, though he can feel himself losing momentum, “to let him face this level of danger unawares?”

“I assumed that he would receive the messages I left—”

“That you carved on a random tree, in a language he barely speaks and a dialect that’s been out of use for three hundred years?”

The hand scratching at Lazar’s ear stills. Belmont looks to the main doors, narrowing his eyes. “I had to be discreet. The one I got this information from—she couldn’t know I was passing it along.”

“You mean Carmilla,” Adrian says. It’s not something they’ve talked about, but the Styrian armor the two vampire soldiers had worn is distinctive, easily recognizable. That Carmilla survives, that she is involved in this catastrophe, is no longer just a guess.

A shrug, too nonchalant for the stakes of the conversation. “She never gave up her name. Whoever she was, though, she hounded me for months. Trying to gain my allegiance. She repeatedly refused to take no for an answer.”

That’s… huh. Not quite what Adrian had been expecting. “Did she not know who you were?”

“She seemed to. Which only makes the whole thing _ more _confusing.”

This is a lot to think about, and Adrian isn’t sure he has the capacity right now. Why would Carmilla, who is connected and educated enough to know all about the Belmonts, ever try to turn one of them against another? Surely she must know that their familial loyalty—

No. No, actually. She probably doesn’t know much about loyalty at all.

Adrian sighs, putting it aside, circling back to his original point. “I hope, for your sake and Trevor’s, that you _ are _ in fact who you claim to be.”

No response to that, though Adrian can feel the eyes on him before he looks up to confirm he has the Belmont’s attention. “Because if you aren’t,” he continues, “If this is a sham, and you are here to distract him or deceive him, or get something from him, or just _ fuck with his head, _ dangle the idea in front of him that he has living family only to pull it away again—I will _ end you. _”

A long, considering silence. Belmont halfway smiles, like he’s trying to hide it. “Understood,” he says, something like amusement and relief glinting in those sharp blue eyes, so much like Trevor’s. “But you do realize that you got your flair for the dramatic from your father, yes?”

Adrian narrows his eyes, doesn’t drop his gaze. “What do you know of—”

“Your father?” For a second, there’s a flash of pain there, deep and broad and immeasurable, and he’s no better than Trevor is at hiding these things. “I knew him when he was still human. When we both were.”

And that—not the words exactly, but the implication behind it, that Dracula was _ human _ once, that he’d been as frail as the creatures he later condemned to death, shocks Adrian into silence. It isn’t as if he’d thought his father arose at the birth of the world already an immortal, or even that he was the first vampire. But that someone still exists who remembers that before-time—that his father’s human existence is still in living memory—is not something he ever considered.

And wasn’t Leon Belmont’s time only something like four hundred years ago? Could the reign of Vlad Dracula Țepeș have been so short? The power he’d commanded alone…

“Then you are possessed of a unique story,” Adrian finally says; these are questions for another time, when they are less exhausted, when Adrian has had time to wrap his head around the fact that their answers actually exist. “One that no one else alive can tell.”

Belmont sighs again, a short little huff of breath. “Maybe so.”

* *

* *

* *

Darkness and light, walls that shake and crumble, pain and the lack of pain and fear and—

It’s over. There’s nothing else worth thinking: it’s just, simply, _ done_.

Worse: it’s all been for nothing, agonizingly in vain. Bernhard is dead, never to menace another, but his power has just been passed on to someone who—Leon can acknowledge it now, teeth grit in agony, staring up at the bright, blurred ceiling with blood drying on his face—is just as wicked and amoral as the powerful old vampire had been. 

_ Mathias_, he thinks, heart desperate with loss. But he doesn’t bother asking _ why; _ there’s no longer anyone who can answer. He understands now that his friend died long ago—when Elisabetha died, really. 

It doesn’t make this betrayal any easier to bear.

Over him hovers the creature Mathias had called _ Death, _ as if such a force were anything but stealthy and incorporeal and relentless; as if it could ever have a body, could be spoken to and fought with and beaten. Death, Leon knows. He’s seen it take his comrades, watched it take his betrothed. This? Just a demon, just another monster. But he’s still dying, and it’s an academic distinction in the end.

A wave of red pulses through the form, lighting it up like flaming blood. It’s preparing an attack, probably something devastating. Overkill, really, given that Leon felt his back break on the last throw, hasn’t been able to move from this spot on the floor since. Somewhere nearby, the whip calls. It wants him to reach for it, is screaming for him to reach for it. But it’s too far away. 

_ I’m leaving, and you’re stuck here forever, _ he thinks toward it, toward Sara. _ I’m sorry. _

The glow above him peaks in brightness, magic flowing from it in waves, coalescing into a burst that Leon knows, with surety, will end him. He isn’t at peace with it. But the certainty is, somehow, comforting. 

Then, out of nowhere, a familiar voice: “Stop.”

The energy disperses instantly, the residue of it trailing out to the ends of the demon’s wingfeathers, gathering there in dozens of glowing red spots of light. They wave lightly in the air all around him, like butterflies, like flowers in the breeze. It’s oddly beautiful.

A silhouetted face comes between them, blocking out the light: long hair, devilishly pointed ears, a glint of red at its throat where the crimson stone sits. Leon closes his eyes, turns his face away, because he cannot do this again—he cannot. 

“Leon,” the voice says, indulgent, like a parent who knows they should be scolding a child but doesn’t have the heart to do it. A hand clasps his chin, forces his face forward, and when he dares to look up again he can see something held tightly in the death-demon’s grasp, well over Mathias’s back—a misty human form, nearly solid. It’s like looking into a fogged mirror; it’s _ him. _

Well. Perhaps this thing really is the reaper after all. At least he won’t have to live with this betrayal for much longer; he can already feel his awareness dissolving.

Then the hand on his chin tightens, claws digging into his skin—sharpening his attention, dragging it back to Mathias. “You said you didn’t want this gift from me,” his old friend whispers, hanging low over his face, close enough for cold, damned breath to roil over his skin. “But it occurred to me that you wouldn’t have wanted me to do any of the things I’d done, had you a choice in the matter.”

“No,” Leon barely manages, voice weak, because he knows where this is going. _ If you ever loved me, don’t do this. _“Please.”

“But you don’t have a choice, do you?” Mathias continues, voice caught somewhere between cruelty and fondness. “I was still thinking too much like a mortal, you see. But that isn’t necessary anymore—and not giving you _ something _ you for the loss of your dear Sara doesn’t sit well with me.”

“Then_ let me die_,” he rasps out around the blood pooling in his throat, choking him. “That’s all I want from you, now.”

Mathias seems to consider this for a moment; cast all in shadow, his expression is impossible to make out. There’s a pained little noise hanging in the air, though Leon cannot say who it came from. Mathias traces one clawed finger along the line of his jaw, like a lover—like he used to _ before, _before Elisabetha and before Sara, when they were young and stupid and lighting up every battlefield with their mad, reckless courage and celebrating every night they still lived with the same abandon—

Then Mathias leans in, pushing Leon’s face roughly to one side. “But it’s not what _ I _ want,” he rumbles against Leon’s throat, as if life and death were so trivial to command, were the matter of a whim. Perhaps now, for him, they are.

And he bites.

* *

Things get disjointed, after that. He’s aware of sensations—pain, fear. Being pressed back to the floor as his broken body tries vainly to fight Mathias off, then a heaviness settling into his bones, an unravelling as something vital and important is pulled out of him, snagging painfully on every craggy memory and regret. His soul? He thinks it might be his soul. He remembers Rinaldo’s story, his poor daughter turned into a murderous demon, and he knows that whatever awakens in this body will not have a human spirit, will not truly be _ him. _

Will it be like dying, then? Will he find himself in the Creator’s kingdom, even as his body walks on? Or will Mathias consume his soul like he did Bernhard’s? Will it be drawn to Sara’s, in the whip? Will it wander, restless? 

The red points of light hover, smeary and indistinct. In Death’s hands, the misty shape of him dissolves, disperses. The reaper is taking no prize with him tonight.

Then his mouth is being forced open, something pressed between his teeth, and a blooming of iron and salt and something unspeakably dark and terrifying expands in his senses, overwhelms him—washes him away.

* *

“Do with your eternity what you will,” Mathias says after, a perverse twist of hope in his voice, though it’s otherwise all cool indifference. He touches cold fingers to Leon’s cheek, to his closed eyes, then stands back up, brushing the dust from his robes. The blood on his face, he doesn’t bother to clean away. “But never let it be said that I do not pay my debts.”

A swishing of cloth, the tread of footsteps, retreating. The beating of deathly wings follows.

Leon is alone.

He's alone, in a disintegrating castle far from home, far from help, and he’s hurting. But he can feel his body knitting itself back together with impossible speed, can feel the sensation return to his legs, a stinging rush of agony that strangles a cry from his throat before it subsides down to a crawling, seething itch. The bleeding grows sluggish, then stops. He'll—he'll survive, his battlefield instincts tell him. In some form. If he can get out of this place. 

He can't say he'll _ live_. He knows that much. Before Mathias had even stood up to leave, Leon had felt a dull weight settle in his chest, heavy and dead and nauseating, his own heart gone still. His body is feverish with the contradiction of being alive and dead all at once, rejecting itself, remaking itself, and his head is spinning, spinning—but under it all, he still feels horribly, tauntingly like himself. 

Sara had still been herself, right up until the end. But she had been turning _ slowly, _ like a poison gradually spreading; she’d not had her soul torn from her all at once.

_ When will I lose myself? _ he wonders. It sits like curiosity, benign, idle, like this is something he’s watching from outside—and maybe he is. Maybe his soul is just tethered here for the moment, like a boat whose towline has gotten tangled in the dock pilings, before it tears itself free. _ When do I become a monster? Will I get a warning, or will it just happen? _

A rumble rips through the space, and a chunk of masonry dislodges from the ceiling, crashes down a foot to his right. He finds he doesn’t care.

Leon Belmont is alone, the walls shaking down around him and his oath still fresh where he's carved it into his heart and his blood going cold on the floor beneath him, going cold _ inside _ him—and all he can find it in his brave warrior's soul to do is curl up and weep. For Sara, for Mathias, for Rinaldo and his family; for his own innocence, now nothing but the embers of a burnt offering on the altar of eternity.

* *

* *

* *

All around them, the castle seems to be holding its breath.

“It isn’t a story for now,” Leon says, in the darkness of Dracula’s castle, to Dracula’s own son. He knows he’ll just have to tell it again, once Trevor wakes, and he hopes he’ll be forgiven for not wanting to recount all the details twice. Still, there’s something about Alucard’s posture, his tone. “...you really do care for him, don’t you?”

Alucard narrows his eyes. “My father?”

“No,” he says, because that’s obvious, no matter what the boy had been forced to do. “Trevor. And Miss Belnades, for that matter. You’re very protective.”

A noisy sigh, and Alucard turns away from him, hands settling in the pockets of his coat. Doesn’t reply, which was halfway what Leon expected.

“Right,” he says, looking down to his hands, working the gloves back on. He cannot quite hold back a huff of exhausted laughter. “It’s a liability to admit it. It puts them in danger. I understand that.”

“You find that funny?”

“Not at all,” Leon says, looking up, because that protective edge in Alucard’s voice has just gone sharper, reminds him of a wolf standing in defense of its pack, and it’s important that he be understood. “It’s… heartening, I guess. Our families don’t have the best history. It’s nice to see that starting to change.”

“You’re the one who swore vengeance against my father—brought an entire hunting clan into existence for that express purpose.”

“Yes. I did. But that’s nothing to do with you, is it?”

A long silence, then, as Mathias’s boy considers that. It’s not that complicated, really, but Leon supposes that in the Year of Our Lord 1476, perhaps being held accountable for the sins of the father is more commonplace than it used to be.

“I’ll say it again,” Alucard finally says, more to the ceiling than to Leon himself. “It’s very simple. Don’t hurt him. If you are who you say you are, that shouldn’t be difficult. And you owe him answers.”

“I do, yes.” Truly, he owes Trevor more than just answers; the man has spent the past 15 years tenaciously keeping the family legacy alive entirely on his own, and for that, Leon owes him all the gratitude in the world—and all the apologies, for not being there to share in that burden. “He’ll have them. Assuming he wants to talk to me at all.”

Here, for the first time tonight, Alucard cracks a smile—just a tiny thing, twisted crooked on one end. “Are you really worried about that?”

“He was raised to kill what I am—raised to see all vampires as monsters, because most of them are. He may not be able to see past that.”

“He was raised to kill what I am, too,” Alucard says, demeanor softening in the wake of that smile. “He’s done a fairly shit job of it, as he would say. I wouldn’t worry about _ that._”

“What would you worry about?”

Alucard doesn’t hesitate. “Whether he’s going to punch your fangs in when he realizes what this implies about himself, and about the family he’s spent a lifetime idolizing and resenting in turns.”

Wonderful—though Leon can’t say he’d blame him. It’s one of those secrets that only ends well if it’s _ kept_; the second it gets out, it tends to cause more anguish than being open about it in the first place. “Fair enough,” he says, dropping his gaze back to the stairs, catching back another yawn. He has not had to keep daylight watch in a very, very long time.

“You’ll survive, I’m sure,” Alucard says, with that same knife-edged smile, and it’s unclear if it’s meant to be reassuring or sarcastic.

Leon laughs—because it’s been a long morning, a long month, a long year, and because he can, these days. That’s important. “I’ve made it through worse.”

* *

* *

* *

He’ll make it. He isn’t sure that he wants to.

He pulls himself to his feet eventually, some lingering survival instinct kicking in, stumbling and staggering out of the castle and into the woods. Dawn is coming on, as Mathias had said. He could—he could fix this, he could fix it right now, all he’d have to do is stop running, stop looking for shelter, stay exactly where he is and let the sunrise have him.

He can’t stop running. Something is driving him forward that is operating on a level lower than thoughts or wishes or self-destructive loathing of his own newly damned state, driving him to stay in the densest copses of trees, to crawl into the shadow of a wooden bridge arched across a muddy creekbed, to sit there and shiver in the cool muck and moss when all he _ wants _ is to feel the warmth of the sun one last time. He’s so cold, so tired, and he’s wept himself dry, the sorrow burning itself out, leaving him hollow and empty. 

And no matter the deprivation of his early life and the hardships of the battlefield, he has never been so _ ravenously _ hungry. 

_ When do I become a monster? _ he had wondered, lying there on the cold stone floor of the castle, waiting to feel the tension of whatever cord is holding him here pulling tight, shuddering in the air and then snapping, breaking free. He had thought it would be a sudden thing, and that _ he _ wouldn’t really be present for the aftermath of it all. 

But now, balled up in the dark, curling around a hunger that makes his stomach clench as if around knives and makes his head spin with a different kind of need than he’s ever had for food or drink, he realizes—this is going to be a slow erosion. It’s the hunger that’s going to do it, is going to winnow him away until all that’s left is bones and instinct and selfish, endless need. It will be a _ corruption _ of the self, not an absence of the self, and he’s going to be here for every second of it.

“Damn you, Mathias,” he mutters between his teeth, though he knows it is redundant, unnecessary; Mathias is already well enough damned.

And so, now, is Leon.

* *

Rinaldo is waiting for him at the edge of his property, just as he was the first time. He can feel the barrier just a foot in front of him; it’s innocent enough, at that distance. Like static. It’s a good distraction from other sensations, and he welcomes it.

“Thank god,” the old man says when he spots Leon, sighing in relief. “As long as you were gone, I thought—well, come on, come inside. You’re a mess.”

“I can’t,” Leon says, quiet. 

Rinaldo stops short, turns back to look at him—to really look at him, this time. To see past the dirt and the blood and what he must think is just the pallor of exhaustion, physical and emotional both.

“No,” he says, genuine sadness in his voice. It doesn’t stop him from taking a cautious step backward, putting himself well within the barrier’s bounds. “Not you, too.”

Leon shakes his head, not denying it, just… in terrible awe of the situation. “You have nothing to fear from me, Rinaldo. With or without the barrier.” Is that true? He wants to believe it is, but his jaw aches and his hunger yawns wide and it’s probably for the best if Rinaldo doesn’t trust him. “I only came to tell you that Bernhard is dead. Your family’s been avenged.”

“My... thanks,” Rinaldo says, a little uncertain, but he closes his eyes for a moment, takes a breath. “They can rest now, and perhaps my time in this forest can come to an end.” 

“I also wanted to thank you for your help.”

“Clearly,” the man says, voice wavering with guilt, “I didn’t help as much as I should have.”

No—it’s not Rinaldo’s fault for not knowing that Mathias was playing a game here, was playing all of them. Rinaldo’s as much a victim of that scheming as Leon is. He shakes his head, dismissing it. “Bernhard’s dead. You did enough.” 

“But…” A careful pause. “If he’s dead, why are you still—”

Leon closes his eyes, interrupts before the question can finish. “He wasn’t the one that did this.”

“Ah. Of course. What… well. This is a strange question I find myself asking. But as you seem to still be in control of yourself for the moment… what will you do?”

A frustrated sigh; Leon plants his hands on his hips, paces a few steps, restless. He’s still half convinced he’s going to throw himself into the next dawn, but… “I have my own justice to seek, now. And another evil that needs to be stopped.” He stops walking, stares at his mud-covered boots, at the feet he should never have stood upon again. The collar of his coat is itchy against his skin, where the blood has dried. He is so, _ so _ hungry. “I guess I’ll see how long I can hold onto that, before…”

He trails off. Rinaldo makes no effort to finish the sentence. They both know.

Instead, the man gestures to Leon’s belt, where the whip still hangs. “You’re still carrying that.”

Leon shakes his head, unhooks the whip from his belt, studies it in his hands. The glove leather will give him a few moments’ protection, at least. “It hurts—whatever alchemy you used to make it effective against vampires in the first place. But…” he brings it back toward himself, holds it close in. It burns a little, is profoundly uncomfortable to be close to, but the rage he’d felt from it in Mathias’s presence, in Bernhard’s, is noticeably absent. “I don’t think Sara can hate me, even like this.”

“Then you should keep it,” Rinaldo says, with the tone of a man who knows he’s making a foolish, sentimental decision, and is making it anyway. “Honor her sacrifice. Use it for your vengeance.”

Leon huffs a laugh, derisive. “My vengeance, which I will probably just forget about in a few days’ time anyway.” He lifts his free hand, sets it across his eyes, watches all the bright shocks of light dance there under the pressure. Another good distraction. “I’ve never been so—so—”

“So hungry?”

“God forgive me, yes.”

Rinaldo is quiet a moment, thoughtful. Then he turns, disappears into his cabin, returns a moment later with a small wooden crate. 

“Here,” he says, setting the crate onto the ground, just outside the barrier. There’s a sharp glass-on-glass noise from inside, the ting and scrape of vessels clanking together. There’s also a—a _ smell_, coming from it, that—it’s—

“What is _ that? _ ” Leon asks, prickly and suspicious, not moving an inch toward it. All of a sudden, he can feel some fragile thread of control shaking in the air, ready to snap. _ When do I— _

Rinaldo sighs, looks almost shamefully toward the ground. “There are a lot of alchemical rituals that call for blood,” he says simply, offering no further explanation. “From animals, mind. I’m no monster myself. But if I’m leaving this place, I’ll be abandoning the more fragile of my materials anyway.”

Oh. That—that explains the smell, and the way it’s made his hunger spike, digging frustrated claws into the pit of his stomach and _twisting_. Leon feels abruptly dizzy, reaches to put one hand onto the low-hanging branch of a tree. “I don’t think that’s a good idea—I mean—”

“Leon, sit down. Before you fall.”

Leon looks up from where he’d been studying the tree’s bark pattern, trying desperately to steady his stomach, steady his mind. Rinaldo is looking at him like he’s being an idiot child, and all at once Leon can absolutely believe the man had been a father once.

He slumps down to one knee, does his best to sit without collapsing.

“Listen to me,” Rinaldo says, settling to the ground across the barrier from him, and for the first time since he turned around and really looked, really saw what Leon had become, he doesn’t sound like he’s nervously treading water. “There are things I didn’t tell you about my daughter—details that meant nothing in explaining why I was pursuing vengeance against Bernhard. But they are relevant now.”

He remembers the story—the dead son and wife, the laughing daughter, the sea of steaming blood, and just like that, Leon feels his insides turn sickeningly. If just the _ thought _ of it—

“It took me a while to figure out what had happened when,” Rinaldo says, guarded, keeping a watchful eye on him. “But as near as I could tell, she was turned _ days _ before I returned. And the blood, the bodies—they were fresh. She held out that long before the hunger overwhelmed her.”

“She must have been very strong,” Leon whispers, curling an arm around his own middle.

Rinaldo sighs, pain still evident even after all the years that have passed. “I’ve never known for sure if that was simply the natural progression of it all—Bernhard never turned anyone who didn’t become a monster. But maybe it was the hunger itself that damned her. If I’d been there, if I could have helped her stay ahead of that hunger… then perhaps…”

“That’s fantasy,” Leon says, because even through his own anguish, he can hear the guilt, and Rinaldo doesn’t deserve it. “Whatever’s tethering me here—it can’t last. We both know that.”

A raised eyebrow, almost scolding. “I try to be very clear about what I know and what I don’t. What you’re saying is _ likely, _ but I don’t know that that it is _ true_.”

He doesn’t know… he doesn’t _ know_? How could he not—he’d been so certain, about Sara’s inevitable degeneration, about the whip and about everything else, and— 

“Sara might not have needed to die, then,” he says, and he can hear the accusation in his voice. And maybe it’s unfair, if Bernhard really did corrupt everything he touched; maybe what happened to her and what has now happened to Leon are somehow inherently different, but all he can see right now is the look on Sara’s face the moment before the whip landed—

Rinaldo licks his lips, takes a long time to answer. When he does, it doesn’t sound as defensive as Leon figures it should. “That was the only way to destroy Bernhard. There _ was _no other way. She knew that, and you knew that, and that sacrifice was hers to make—so that none would share her fate.”

So that none would—a laugh bubbles up bitter and dark, and he finds his face pressed into his own hands, dried blood flaking off of his skin.

“I know,” Rinaldo says. “I know. The inner workings of fate are… precarious in their irony, sometimes.”

“_Precarious_.”

“We’ll say painfully unjust.”

“None of this matters,” Leon says, reaching to push the crate away, only to discover that his strength has deteriorated to the point that the weight of all the glass and liquid is too much for him to budge. “I’ll stop… the one who did this, and then I’ll end this nightmare. I don’t want to prolong it with… with _ this_.”

“You’ll never manage it, like you are now. You’ll just lose yourself faster. You’ll hurt someone.”

“Then forget vengeance; I’ll end it this coming dawn.”

A long, careful quiet. Rinaldo drums a finger on the edge of the crate, a soft and muffled sound but in Leon’s ears it’s like thunder.

“She isn’t on the other side, you know,” Rinaldo finally says. “Even if you find a way to die without it being suicide—you won’t find her there.”

Because she’s bound to a piece of blood-soaked, braided leather. Bound to the earth forever, in who knows what state. Alone. “I know that. I know.”

A hand reaches out through the barrier, settles on his arm; it isn’t the most involved gesture, but in context, it’s a remarkable act of trust. “So stay in the world, Leon. Bring light to its darkened corners. For as long as you can.”

* *

* *

* *

He watches in silence as Alucard slips off into one of the side corridors, seeking the sedating nepenthe of the midday sun—sets his sword across his knees, fighting off his own body’s demands for rest.

There is more, still, that needs to be done here.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmmmm. some of that seemed a little familiar. 
> 
> Also, Leon, bb? When people are trying to help you, count yourself lucky and let them. It's not something you're going to have the benefit of very often.
> 
> Alucard is the best overprotective bf <3


	10. Chapter 10

*

A person can only toss and turn and stare at the ceiling for so long before their mind beats them at their own game and renders them unconscious, but it’s often a restless sort of sleep that leads to getting up exhausted, drawn, feeling like they hadn’t slept a wink the entire night.

When Adrian wakes, dusk purple and orange outside the window, it’s on the tip of his tongue to complain likewise—that he hadn’t slept at _all_. But he’s woken to a cool, empty bed, and the tired grumpiness gives way instantly to panic.

Did something go wrong during the day? Did Trevor take a turn for the worse? Were the two of them enthralled and abducted while he slept, oblivious? _Have they been betrayed? _

But the air smells like fresh bread and sausage and the butter it’s fried in, and that’s been one of their winter staples, so more likely they are just off making an evening breakfast for anyone still in the castle that eats food. As for the rest of them—well, he supposes he has enough stored blood to go around, as long as they don’t take up permanent residence.

Adrian takes a deep breath, wills the anxiety out of his system. Tries to remember what it’d felt like when he’d crawled into bed earlier and Trevor had sleepily snagged his middle with the arm not already around Sypha, pulled him close: like things can still be okay.

When he makes it to the kitchen, Trevor’s up and about, standing over the iron-bellied stove with a pan of butter and grease, turning sausages carefully. It looks like Sypha’s changed the bandages, because they’re clean and dry and not bled through at all, and if not for their stark white presence and the dark circles under his eyes—and the fact that he’s subtly leaning on the wall for support—it would be hard to tell anything had happened to the man.

Remarkable resilience. Less of a mystery, now.

Doesn’t make it any less scary that they’d nearly lost him, and as Adrian sidles by it’s pure fondness and habit that compels him to lean in and drop a kiss on Trevor’s cheek.

Trevors stiffens, barely perceptible, and just like that Adrian jumps straight to _He’s afraid of me now_ and _He’s afraid of what I might do_ and _Maybe he should be_, before an alternative occurs to him in the form of another overlapping heartbeat: they aren’t alone in the kitchen.

Adrian tosses a glance behind himself and, okay. Sypha’s at the table, the source of the extra heartbeat and _obviously_ not the issue—she has that stone with her, is rolling it across the tabletop between her hands, the plate in front of her spotted with the crumbs of breakfast. But the elder Belmont is there too, one of Adrian’s stone mugs in hand, and that might be a bigger concern. 

Adrian meets the man's gaze, is expecting disapproval, accusation, something like that—all the disappointment Trevor's always feared from his ancestors' ghosts. But all that’s actually there is a sort of dawning understanding, and it makes Adrian feel strangely exposed.

Sypha, meanwhile, is rolling her eyes, scooping the stone up in one hand. “_That_ wasn’t awkward,” she teases. 

“I…” Adrian starts, at a bit of a loss. He turns to Trevor, who’s focusing very determinedly on the pan in his hand, shaking his head slightly against the flush that would probably be rising up his cheeks if he had any bloodflow to spare. 

“Incredible,” Trevor mumbles under his breath, fighting off a grin. “The picture of discretion, huh?”

Adrian pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, I…”

“Nah, it’s all right. He was going to figure it out eventually anyway.” Trevor stops whispering, too, because that is just as pointless as pretending they _didn’t_ all just spend the day wrapped around each other; vampire senses being what they are, he can probably smell it on them. “And before you ask, yes, I’ve been sitting out most of the evening like a good convalescent. I just like mine a specific way and I love her but Sypha is, incredibly, a worse cook than you are.”

Taking the conversation change—and the sidelong clarification—as the gifts they’re clearly meant to be, Adrian glances around, notices the teetering pile of used plates and mugs near the wash basin. Isabel and her people are probably heading out as soon as the sun’s down, then. He’ll need to talk to them first.

Sypha, meanwhile, scoffs. “Have you ever gotten sick from anything I’ve cooked?”

“Hey, just not _poisoning_ people isn’t enough to call you a good cook.”

“It is _one_ of the requirements, yes.”

Across the table, Leon Belmont, dignified paragon of hunters, is trying very hard not to laugh into his mug. It’s empty, he’s long since finished with it, but it _does_ make a convenient prop to hide behind in the face of these two’s contagious idiocy. 

And Adrian is, he’s willing to admit, a little lost. Is this it? Revelation after revelation, and they’re back to the usual banter, one more mug in the basin but otherwise business as usual?

Looking around more carefully though, he can see the tension in the scene: Sypha’s is the dread of knowing exactly what is about to happen and being powerless to stop it; Leon’s is the unease of knowing he’s about to do or say something that is going to change everything for at least one person present, and doing anything possible to stall for time; Trevor’s is the stress of not knowing, of not even knowing what exactly he doesn’t know, of asking a question blindly but still knowing, somehow, that he won’t like the answer.

Adrian fetches a clean mug and plate, gets himself some solid breakfast and liquid breakfast both; he’ll need the energy. Settles down next to Sypha in silence.

“So,” Trevor says finally, dropping into one of the empty chairs, breakfast in hand and gravity being a little harsher with him than usual. He’s putting a good show on, but the exhaustion is there just beneath the surface, is pricking at the corners of his eyes and slowing his every movement. He’s far, far too pale. “Now that the sleepy arsehole himself is awake, can I finally get this damn story?”

“You’ve been waiting on me?” Adrian asks, surprised.

“I’d rather not go through this twice,” Leon says, a little wry. “It isn’t something I particularly enjoy remembering.”

* *

So he begins the tale—about this Mathias, a name as foreign to Adrian as any stranger’s, and their friendship spanning a decade or more—about the wife that Mathias lost, and the way he lost his mind too, in the aftermath. Adrian can feel something twinge in his chest at that, hot and sharp, because he has spent a good portion of his worst days blaming himself for failing to pull his father from his madness; to hear that this all had happened before, that this was just a repeat of a familiar pattern… it isn’t a _comfort_ really, but it’s...

“You couldn’t have saved him,” Adrian finds himself saying, before the words fully form in his mind. He feels unfocused, not looking at anything in particular. “And neither could I.”

“No,” Leon confirms, shaking his head. It sounds like a truth found on the hardest possible path, found abandoned amidst all the other broken things and saved for just the moment it would bring the most respite. “That was just who he was—a man completely unable to deal with loss.”

“Is that what you were?” Trevor cuts in, eyes narrowed, speculative. “Another loss he couldn’t deal with?”

“That’s… very perceptive,” Leon says, sounding surprised. He sighs, pulls the mug toward himself again before remembering that it’s empty. It settles back to the tabletop with a hollow thunk. “He gave a lot of other reasons, in later years. Excuses, really. But yes, I think that’s the real truth behind it.”

“So you didn’t ask for this.”

The Belmont laughs sharply, baring a glimpse of fang just as sharp. “God, no. Ask to be damned, to become a monstrosity? Why would anyone want that?”

“I don’t know, you seem to be doing okay.”

“You’d be amazed what you can get used to, given enough time.” 

And that may be true but Trevor still looks skeptical, incredulous, like he doesn’t quite understand how a trained, experienced vampire hunter could have something like that forced on him. Never mind that a single vampire had him at her mercy last night; if they’d had _that_ in mind for Trevor instead of just killing him, Adrian has no doubt they’d be fielding a very different crisis right now.

“You... honestly thought I had chosen this?” Leon asks, leaning forward a bit, meeting Trevor’s silent disbelief with a healthy dose of his own.

Trevor shrugs, leans back in the chair, lets out a sigh. Rubs at his neck a little, probably doesn’t realize he’s doing it. “I don’t know enough to judge. I figured, death hanging over a man’s shoulder can make him do crazy things, sometimes.”

“More true than you realize,” the easy counter, and even though he isn’t the target of them, Adrian has to admit that the sheer brightness of those eyes is unnerving. “But it would have made deciding to _hunt_ vampires a bit of a strange choice.”

“Deciding to _keep_ hunting them, you mean,” Trevor corrects, uncertain.

Leon pauses before answering, and when he does, it’s with care. “...no. That was when I chose this path—before that, I was only trying to save Sara.”

Blankness for a second, the wheels turning. “Wait,” Trevor says, finally, holding up a hand as if he can halt this all midair, keep it from reaching him. “Sara? This is the _whip_ story? That can’t be right. I’ve heard that story—every kid in the family heard that story growing up. I’m a little hazy on some of the details, but I’m pretty damn sure that was before you ever came to Wallachia.”

“Yes.”

“Before you started the family here.” 

A hesitation, pointless but unavoidable. “Yes.”

Silence, for a long moment, as the implications sink in. Adrian can see it in Trevor’s eyes the moment the truth clicks into place, a sudden rush of understanding—about himself, his family, his entire worldview—that he wants _no fucking part of._

“...Trevor?” Sypha asks into the silence. “Talk to us.”

“Oh, fuck no,” Trevor says after a moment, sharp and low, pushing up from the table, breakfast forgotten. “This is—I’m—I’m gonna go.” He sways a little as he stands, struck dizzy, and has to take a moment to steady himself. “Leaving. Now. Going somewhere else.” _ Don’t follow me_, clear as day in his body language, hands still up wardingly as he backs toward the door. 

“Trevor…” Adrian tries, because Trevor’s voice sounds twisted up in itself and _wrong_ and his ancestor is sitting there looking unsurprised by the rejection but quietly distressed all the same, and the potential for this to spiral out of control is so, so clear. 

“You shut the fuck up,” Trevor says, turning to point straight at him, and the words don’t hurt as much as the tone; the hunter has gone cold, vicious, and if it weren’t for the year they’d known each other, Adrian wouldn’t even be able to see all the confusion and pain and uncertainty seeping out underneath—a sudden stab wound to the psyche, bleeding freely. “You don’t get to sit there and—how could you not have _known?_ How could you not fucking _taste_—” A pause, then, “Wait. You _did,_ didn’t you?”

“In retrospect, yes,” Adrian answers, because it’s all obvious now, and honesty seems like the best approach here—even if his sense of discretion would prefer this conversation happen privately. “This is probably what that was. I _didn’t_ recognize it at the time—that was the truth.”

“How could you not—”

“Because you are something like _twelve generations removed_, you idiot,” Adrian snarls, doing the math as quickly and roughly as he can. Close enough. “I’d like to see you identify one drop in a thousand of _anything_.”

“You know what? Don’t care,” Trevor says, and from the tired flippancy in his voice, he really doesn’t. “Leaving. Now.”

And then he’s out the door and gone, the Morning Star jangling on his belt, a glint of gold off of the crest on his back the last thing any of them see.

Adrian sighs. Isn’t sure who, or what, he’s sighing about.

“That went about as well as I expected it to,” Sypha says, resigned and glum. “Where do you think he will go?”

It’s an important question. For now, Trevor will need space, will need solitude to think—but eventually he will need to be found and reeled back in, brought back into the embrace of his family before he forgets that it exists. 

So: the woods? The roof? The hold? The weapons room? The— 

“The wine cellar,” they both say at once, because no matter how much better he’s been in the last year, this is huge, and Trevor’s first instinct will still be to _drown_ it. 

“We’ll have to intervene,” Sypha adds, surprisingly practical in the face of these revelations, “before he drinks himself to death.”

“Is that… something you’re actually worried about?” Leon asks, the first time he’s spoken since Trevor’s blowup. He looks worried and a little guilty, and maybe he should. “Shouldn’t you stop him?”

Adrian rubs a hand across his eyes, presses in. The truth of this isn’t really his to say, but if the elder Belmont is going to keep dropping these sorts of revelations, he should at least know what the consequences are likely to be. “Trevor has some unhealthy coping mechanisms that he’s made admirable progress in leaving behind, but they’re still the only ones he has. Mostly due to having lost his entire family when he was _twelve_,” he says, voice growing pointed. “Or so he thought.”

A flash of challenge in the man’s eyes, an equal stab of pain, but the question he settles on is less confrontational than it could have been: “Do you believe he would have accepted me, then?”

And damn it, he’s right. It’s very doubtful. Trevor’s told him a tiny bit about that time in his life—mostly it involved killing everything with fangs that he could find. It had been a distressing conversation, because of both the cold ruthlessness of Trevor’s youth and the fact that he’d come close to dying on those hunts any number of times, too small still to use his weapons correctly, to fill out his own boots. 

“You could have prevented the whole tragedy in the first place,” he suggests instead, irrationally irritable about something so long past.

The look he gets in response is positively haunted. “I was asleep. I didn’t know it was happening. Are you questioning whether I would have _saved my family_, had I known?”

The man’s tone has gone so suddenly cool, so abruptly cutting, that it hits Adrian at once: he has been scolding the Belmont as if he were Trevor, pure force of habit, but that’s not who’s sitting before him. This is a vampire nearly as old as his father had been, of the same powerful bloodline, and his disarming, earnest good nature does not change that fact or mitigate how dangerous he has the potential to be.

He remembers their conversation in the entry hall, remembers: _he isn’t afraid of you._

And why should he be? He’s probably killed more vampires than any other Belmont who’s ever lived, and plenty of other nightmares besides. He isn’t the revered patriarch of the family because he looked good posing with a sword.

“Of course not,” Sypha cuts in, a hand on Adrian’s arm that’s at once calming and quietly restraining. “Alucard is just—frustrated. On Trevor’s behalf.”

Leon nods, demeanor softening back up like that unnerving little standoff never happened. Right back to being unassuming, to looking painfully young. It’s an impressive act, if it’s an act at all; Adrian suspects the truth is somewhere in between. “I know. Believe me, I am too. If you don’t think I regret not being here for him, then you don’t know much about this family.”

“We don’t, actually,” Adrian admits. “Only what Trevor’s told us, which hasn’t been much.”

Sypha rolls the stone between her fingers, caught up in its depths for a moment. “...and,” she says, looking up, “Clearly there is a lot that he does not know either.”

“Here’s a lesson, then,” Leon says, standing; he’s not as tall as Trevor, nor as thickly built, and it’s far more obvious without the cloak. Really, there’s not much they have in common physically aside from the eyes, but that’s enough; it’s an inheritance that shines straight down through generations. “He doesn’t want to see me right now, and I respect that enough to not push him. I’ll deal with seeing your allies off if the two of you would rather go find him, make sure he isn’t doing anything…”

“Stupid?”

“Regrettable.”

So: stupid, in slightly kinder terms. Adrian almost has to laugh, because while Trevor is far, _far_ from stupid, he has made doing stupid, impulsive things despite his intelligence into an art form. But it’s far too easy to imagine him getting himself into real trouble, in his current state, and the humor doesn’t want to come.

He wants to be _doing something about that_, finding their distressed, wayward friend, helping him through these things. He wants that more than anything.

But Isabel does not know Leon Belmont, knows only that they came back from the ruins with a strange vampire in tow whose identity was never explained to them, nor his allegiances. Two, actually, if you count the unconscious soldier. For all she knows, Leon’s a prisoner too; she won’t trust a thing he says.

She doesn’t know him, but Adrian has a gut feeling that she _should_.

“...we’ll both go,” he finally says, frustrated by the necessity of it. “And do formal introductions. Given names only,” he clarifies, because this isn’t his family secret to spill carelessly. “Sypha, can you start looking for Trevor?”

Sypha nods, pocketing the stone as she stands—gives him a look of reassurance, then turns and heads out into the castle without any further ado.

She’ll find him. 

* *

This isn’t—this isn’t possible. It’s _not_. 

He’d been willing to accept that the founder of the family had fucked up at some point and gotten himself turned; there are risks that go along with hunting vampires, and death is the most common by far but undeath is always a background possibility. And everyone eventually fucks up. He’d even been willing to accept that it’d been _fucking Dracula_ who did it, even though that feels like the setup for a godawful tragic play. 

But this—this idea that—how on earth did he—_who would have ever_—augh, his kids would have been like fucking _Adrian,_ Jesus, all smarmy toothy little arseholes, and follow that line of logic right down the family tree, slip down the branches like it’s been raining and they’re all covered in moss, slick, down and down and—

It’s not possible. It’s a betrayal of his family to even think it. It’s also true—he knows it is, because Adrian fucking tasted it on him, the fucking twat, going on like _Goodness, I don’t know what it possibly could be,_ except he had to have known, hadn’t he? If someone pisses in the beer you might not know exactly who did it but you for damn sure know it’s fucking piss. That kind of taint is unmistakable.

The castle walls go by in a blur. Trevor isn’t entirely sure where he’s going, right now—he’s avoiding stairs and rampways and anything involving _up_ because even just this much walking is wearing him out, making his breath come short and fast, lungs aching. It’s just halls and empty rooms and more halls, the castle helpfully doing its best to get him completely lost, which is just fine as long as it also occasionally gives him a railing or a straight-backed chair to lean against until the latest rush of vertigo passes. 

At one point, he finds himself in a room he’s never seen, sparsely furnished, the walls covered in cabinets and drawers. It’s all fine dark wood and gold accents, and in his frustration he swats a few of the doors open as he passes them. He has every intention to keep walking.

Then he catches a glimpse of one of the cabinet’s contents, and Trevor Belmont is not a man to believe in fate or destiny but he thinks he might make an exception this time—he was destined to find this cabinet at exactly this moment. 

Prize securely in hand, the weight of it satisfyingly solid, he stops and actually _thinks_, for the first time in he isn’t even sure how long—thinks about the numbing cold and the way height has of making him feel small, thinks about all the tall trees he sat in a year ago, shivering in the snowfall as entire towns went up in smoke before his eyes.

He heads for the stairs, and damn his abused body, he will make the climb if it kills him.

* *

“Hey,” he says to the pigeon, noncommittal. It’d fluttered out the window behind him a few minutes after he’d made it onto this ridge of rooftop himself, settled down in his lee to groom through its patchy black and white feathers. Trevor’s been going back and forth on actually speaking to the thing, but it seems like the madman-who-talks-to-animals in him has won the day. “You’re a weird looking pigeon, you know that?”

Predictably, no response. 

He gestures, just circles in the air. “Heh. You look like… like if a crow fucked a chicken.”

It looks at him now, cocks its head to one side to track his movement. It’s definitely not actually listening to him; he knows these Speaker pigeons have some magic laid on them but there’s no magic _that_ crazy. Still, there’s something in its gaze that looks… skeptical? Chastising?

“Yeah,” he says, looking away because he’s not going to let himself be tricked into thinking this is an actual conversation. “One to talk, I guess.”

A helpful sounding burble. Trevor puts the bottle he’s holding to his lips, takes a deep pull from it. It burns going down, feels great, feels exactly like what he needs. He looks at the pigeon, fluffed up next to him in the snow when it could be back in the study, in those warm rafters.

“Listen,” he says, and okay, he’s actually doing this. The bottle swaying between his fingers is already half empty, so god, fuck it. “Do you think he knew? Because I—I keep trying to be angry, like he had to have known. But I…”

The pigeon ignores him, preens under a wing, throws off a pair of loose black feathers that float in front of them for a moment. Trevor snatches them from the air, coordination still intact no matter how numb the rest of him is getting.

“Huh,” he says, spreading the feathers apart between his thumb and forefinger. “Two for joy.” He eyes the bird sidelong. “Be happy, don’t be mad, that what you’re telling me? Damn, your life’s pretty simple, isn’t it, bird?”

It peers at him again, a little glint in the beady eye saying _And what of it?_

“Yeah,” Trevor says, tossing the feathers out to let the wind catch them, carry them away. “It’s too simple. But maybe you’re still right. He didn’t have any reason to lie about it at the time, did he?”

“Of course he didn’t,” comes the reply, and Trevor just about jumps out of his skin, fumbling the bottle and nearly dropping it, because _the pigeon just fucking answered him_ except wait, that actually sounded like _Sypha_.

Which. Makes more sense than a talking pigeon, especially since Sypha is currently crawling out through the same window he used, is joining him on the narrow, precarious edge of the roof. And he’s a little afraid she’s going to fall but he’s more afraid she’s going to try to get him to _talk about it_. She doesn’t say a word, though—just settles alongside him, one hand warm on his shoulder. She dislodges the pigeon while she’s at it, and it flutters back in through the window, disgruntled.

He takes a drink. She watches him do it, but still says nothing. The quiet is comfortable, familiar, and it’s one of the nicest gifts he thinks anyone could give him right now; the only things higher up the list would be another bottle just like this one and for all of this to just be an awful dream.

Sypha’s shivering, though. That’s real. He glances down at her; his face feels like concern. 

“It’s cold out here,” she says eventually, breaking the silence.

It is. Or at least, it was when he first came out, the wind creeping under his cloak, searching for skin and bones to dig into. He feels warm now, though. “Not really feeling it,” he says, almost a tease. “Probably a stupid vampire blood thing, right?”

She huffs, not buying his bullshit for a minute. “That is crap, Trevor Belmont. You never stop complaining about the cold—frostbite this, cold shock that. You’re only not feeling it because you’ve had half a bottle of—wait.” She narrows her eyes at the bottle in his hand, taking in its shape and the sharp, astringent scent in the air. “That isn’t wine. Let me see that.”

He hands it over wordlessly. If she doesn’t give it back, fine, whatever; there’s more where that came from.

She turns it to find the label, mouths words in an unfamiliar language, then: “Whiskey? Half a bottle of _whiskey?_ Trevor, no wonder you aren’t feeling the cold, I’d be surprised if you could feel your own feet right now!”

He looks down, kicks his booted feet against each other where they dangle, heavy. Honestly… “Hm. Getting there.”

She groans, long-suffering. She has, he thinks, been suffering his crap for far, far too long. “Where did you _get this?”_

“Found it.” Technically the truth.

“Under your bed, do you mean?”

“If you’re insinuating,” he slurs, barely managing the word’s five whole syllables, “that I’m the one who _hid it_, then no, you’re. Wrong. I found it. I did.”

“Trevor…”

“Let me have this, okay? Okay, Sypha?” He suddenly feels desperate to be understood; this is _important_. “Let me… let me react to this. It’s not some little thing. I’m not just… being stupid about something small.”

He holds his hand out, expectant; she sighs, hands the bottle back. “No one said you were being stupid.”

“Can hear it in your voice. Pathetic Belmont, drinking away his troubles. At least I’m just drinking _whiskey_, unlike some of my relatives,” he says, and it feels appropriate to punctuate it with another slug from the bottle, tipping his head back hard.

When he lowers it, Sypha has the collar of his shirt in her hand, is peeling it away from the bandages. “...you’re bleeding again,” she says, real concern now, all the scolding evaporated.

He reaches up, touches the bandage; the tips of his fingers come away red. “Damn it. That’s—that’s the booze, too,” he says, gesturing with the bottle. “Always bleed more when you drink.”

Pointed: “So maybe it’s a good time to stop?”

“Look,” he says. “I just—I just found out that my whole family had _fucking vampire blood_ running through it, the whole—all of us. _All of us._ What does that even _mean?_ Is that the only reason…” he trails off, frowning. 

“The only reason what?” she prompts.

Trevor shakes his head. The end of his thought has vanished as if into fog, and he’s suddenly very aware of the cold, of the danger they’re in up here, of the fact that he’s being, yes, _stupid_, and that he’s dragged Sypha into it with him.

“Never mind,” he says, looking hard into the dark brown glass of the bottle, into the quilted pattern that was somehow blown into it, a marvel of glassmaking. “What do you, uh, suggest instead?”

“Come down to the baths with me,” she says without hesitation, tugging on his hand.

He laughs, tugs right back. “There _are_ no baths, remember? We used up all of the water.”

Sypha just huffs a breath, and gestures with her arm out over the landscape visible from their perch; it’s impressive, velvety white hills rolling up into mountains in the distance, the forest frosted over, the sky and the ground blurring together where they meet. “We have no shortage of water.”

“That’s snow.”

“That is water that simply needs to be heated, to remember itself,” she says, smug, though of course he knows that, god, he’s not _ that _ drunk. His point is just that it’s cold and shitty and icy at the moment, which is not what you want in a bath. Also, it isn’t _in_ the baths.

“It’s sort of,” he waves his hand, nonspecifically. “Out here. Not in there, where we need it.”

“Adrian is taking care of that. And I already lit a fire for him to work with.”

That’s quite a mental image: Adrian Țepeș, prince of the night, hauling buckets of snow down to the baths like a common servant. 

Wait. Already… “You had this planned?”

“Of course I did.” She stands, all grace and carelessness, unconcerned by the height or the narrowness of the ledge or the ice slicking its surface; for just a second, Trevor’s heart leaps into his throat. “When I realized where you had gone, I knew you would need warming.”

Then she’s safely in through the window, is offering him her hand to follow, and as that sharp little spike of fear recedes, it’s all he can do to swallow it down and take what she’s offering.

* *

So Trevor lets her lead him down staircase after dizzying staircase, and she doesn’t let go of his hand no matter how chilled he’d let himself get out in the elements, no matter how unnecessary it feels, like she’s afraid if she breaks that contact some undefinable wall will go up between them. 

“It’s okay,” he mutters indistinctly at some point, isn’t sure if she’s heard him, but he gets a squeeze of her hand in response, squeezes back. A silent language of reassurance. Like always. Nothing’s changed. 

_Everything_ has changed, but really, nothing’s changed. Nothing that matters. Right?

When they get to the baths, it feels colder in the room than it should, drier. The circular pools are empty, their ornate stone tile work bared to the air; they drain automatically at a certain rate, Adrian had explained once, and new hot water is brought in, but they’d thrown a bit of a kink into the system last night, hadn’t they? Either way, the warm, clinging humidity he’s gotten used to down here is absent, leaving the place feeling oddly abandoned and stark without that hazy mist, blurring the senses and comfortably dulling the influence of the outside world.

In the far corner, out of sight of the main room and clearly only here in case something goes wrong with the plumbing and _wow_ has something gone wrong with the plumbing, there’s a conventional cast-iron vessel for heating water manually. The pool next to it is already half filled, as Sypha’s high-powered magical flame works to heat the next batch.

Adrian’s standing alongside the cauldron, one hand in the water as if testing for temperature, frowning to himself. When he looks up, though, the frown smoothes itself away. “Ah, _there_ you both are,” he says, shaking the water off his hand. “Sypha, I’m not sure about the tem—” he cuts off as they get closer, taking a long breath in through his nose, scenting the air. “That’s—Trevor. Is that my father’s whiskey?” he asks.

“Don’t know,” Trevor says, though the suggestion is a little concerning. For. Reasons he’s having trouble putting together at the moment. He lifts the bottle, squints at the label; the language it’s written in, maddeningly, remains one that he cannot read. “Found it?”

And he’s expecting Adrian to make another smartarse response, or to get mad at him for, what? Violating his father’s sacred liquor collection? What use does a fucking vampire have for booze, anyway? Or maybe it will make him sad, sad and distant, like everything else from his past has done and fuck, shit, he fucked this up— 

But instead, Adrian just looks at him, long and quiet, then starts laughing, a quiet hysteria that breaks free from his throat like it’s been sitting in there for hours, waiting for an excuse. He rests his hand on the wall to steady himself.

“Since you’re laughing instead of panicking,” Sypha says, conspiratorial, “I’m assuming your father wasn’t in the practice of poisoning his alcohol to keep the humans out of it?” And okay, right, _that’s_ the thing that had been concerning. Because there are things that wouldn’t have fazed fucking _Dracula_ but would kill a lowly Belmont very quickly. Even if—

Nope. Not going down that road. Not right now. That’s what the damn whiskey had been _for._

“No,” Adrian says, rubbing his eyes, trying to speak through the laughter. “Poison tastes just as bitter to us as it does to you. He’d never have spoiled it like that. I have no doubt our Belmont is just, as he appears, very drunk.”

It’s hard to tell if he thinks that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Well. Better than being poisoned or cursed, at least? But even as the laughter works its way out of his system, Adrian is looking at him with concern, and Sypha gives his hand another squeeze, supportive, and what exactly is she being supporting _about_? What has Adrian so worried?

Thinking is making his head hurt.

Trevor shrugs, lifts the bottle back to his lips for another swig.

“Trevor!” Sypha half shouts, half laughs, reaching to snag it out of his uncoordinated grip; she succeeds effortlessly. Which—fair enough. He may not have impulse control for shit when he’s like this, but he still _knows_ when he’s had enough. It just doesn’t usually stop him.

“Come on,” Adrian says, taking his arm, leading him over to one of the fancy little wooden benches where he can get his boots off, get himself undressed. “You spent too long in the cold—let’s see if we can’t thaw you out.”

* *

It’s only when Trevor’s been in the bone-deep warmth of the water long enough to get his brain kicking over again, that he realizes something isn’t right. Sypha’s beside him in the tub, the strong, soft-edged curves of her as alluring through the water’s surface as they always are, begging for the warm hollow of his hands, for the fit of his body. But Adrian’s still just standing by the edge, fully dressed and looking, for him, amazingly awkward.

“Hey, arsehole,” he slurs out, before it occurs to him to maybe be nicer. “You’re gonna get your clothes wet if you don’t take them off first. This is like, basic shit.”

A fractional shake of the head is all the response Adrian gives, for a moment. Then: “I was thinking I’d leave the two of you to it.”

Trevor narrows his eyes; he can feel the sudden agitation from Sypha through the water. 

“What?” she asks, incredulous. “Adrian, why would you—”

“I thought maybe Trevor would prefer to not have to deal with…all of this.” He gestures at himself vaguely, not so much indicating himself as a person but more the full implications of everything he is—something inhuman, something associated with fangs and blood in the night, a reminder of recent revelations. And yeah, just like with Sypha, to see Adrian naked will be to think about sex, which always makes him think about biting, which _honestly_ doesn’t sound as bad right now as it probably should given what he’s just gone through. And Jesus, okay, that’s actually something he should probably examine later when he’s sober, because it’s a little fucked up. Reclaiming experiences is all well and good, but the damn bandages haven’t even come off yet. “Especially after I almost…”

“I think,” Sypha says, sliding up to Trevor’s side, the skin-on-skin of it slippery and distracting in the silky water, “that you are being ridiculous. Trevor?”

Trevor looks up; Adrian’s face is twisted in guilt. This isn’t really about him being a _reminder_, or at least it’s not _just_ about that; Trevor remembers his spine hitting the bookcase up in the study, remembers not being sure if he’d be able to get Adrian off of him before…

And there are things he could say here, to alleviate that guilt, to make things better. The words aren’t there for him, but he knows they exist. Instead of struggling to find them, for once, he takes the path of least resistance—just holds his hand out toward Adrian, a silent invitation.

Adrian crouches at the tub’s edge, hands slung across his knees, inches from Trevor’s. Regards it in silence for a moment.

“If I take that,” he finally says, corner of his mouth pulling into a smirk, “you’re going to just pull me in, clothes and all.”

“Damn, I’ve been outsmarted,” Trevor says, matching the smirk. He pulls the hand back, thumbing over his shoulder toward the benches instead. “You get my, uh. My point though, right?”

“I do. You’re sure?”

Trevor rolls his eyes, looks at Sypha in time to see her doing the same. “_Yes_, for god’s sake, just get in here before the water goes cold.”

Adrian hesitates, nods, disappears behind them to shed his coat neatly onto the hook, his boots lined up against the bench, all so precise and careful; Trevor could turn and watch but he’s seen it so many times he knows the routine by heart and the water has him feeling so languid, so lazy, that it doesn’t seem worth the effort. He’ll be here with them soon enough. Trevor lets the back of his head rest against the edge of the pool, closes his eyes against the stress of the last days and the adrenaline of the fight and the terror of his brush with death—and the shock of everything that came after—all of it pounding in his brain like the worst headache in all the world. He lets himself float away from it.

It’s not like he’s forgotten. It’s not like he doesn’t know who’s in the castle with them, or what it all means. But somewhere between the drink and the water and the company he’s found a place he can view it all from without being _ in _ it, or can choose not to view it at all without feeling like he’s putting his head in the sand. It’s… nice.

The water barely ripples when Adrian slips into it, but Trevor still feels it, surface tension tremoring against his collarbone.

When he opens his eyes again, it’s dimmer—the lights have been half-extinguished, leaving them not in darkness but in a sort of false pre-dawn. There’s enough light to pick out the shine in both his companions’ eyes, but the shadows feel comforting, enveloping, like this is a hidden, secret place where he can do what comes naturally and not worry about judgement. About looking weak. About _being_ weak.

God, when was the last time he didn’t have to _worry_—

Sypha’s hands are on him, turning him slowly so that she’s curled close against his back, supporting whatever weight of him the water isn’t, her breasts and belly soft against his skin and her mouth damp when she presses a chaste kiss to the side of his neck—below the ear, above the dressings. There’s no urgency to it. 

_ When was the last time— _

Adrian has slipped between his legs, rises up on his knees in the water for a moment to run warm wet hands through Trevor’s hair and press his lips to the crown of his head, before sinking back down. He rearranges himself with impossible grace, presses chest to chest, supporting him on this side just as Sypha is supporting on the other.

He can feel the lingering burn of both their mouths—beneath his ear, atop his head, in all the other hundreds of places they’ve tasted him—and feels the shelter of their bodies around him, and god, it feels like _home_. Something in his chest hurts, pulling at his ribs with the sheer sweet agony of simply _having_, of having and not worrying about losing, of being held and kept and knowing that all of it, the concern and the care and the love, are utterly unconditional. 

Hidden by the darkness, he doesn’t fight it when he presses his eyes closed and he feels moisture leak free, tracing a cold line down his cheek.

“You want me to talk about this shit, don’t you,” he mumbles, more a statement than a question.

“Eventually,” Adrian rumbles against his throat, hands under the water and settling on Trevor’s sides, blunt nails raking down his ribs. 

“But not now,” Sypha whispers, just as low, just a breath against his ear. She sets her forehead on his shoulder, exhales against damp skin. “Right now, it is time for Trevor Belmont to know that he is loved.”

Trevor sighs, sinks down between them. He can feel a sting where the moisture hits his wound, pictures in his mind the tendrils of red threading out across the surface of the water, grotesque, beautiful. 

On the face of it, what she’s said seems obvious; he knows that they care for him, that no one who didn’t would tolerate his presence for so long. But it’s one thing to love the heroically misunderstood survivor of an innocent family wronged, and another to love the last straggler in a long line of monster-tainted, rightfully persecuted outcasts.

It would be hypocritical of them to reject him based just on that, wouldn’t it? But maybe there’s something about ancient secrets and unspoken origins and all the darkness that lingers around those things that is worse than the blood itself.

This is too much to think about, right now. He’s suffering from blood loss and trauma and emotional shock and maybe cold shock on top of it and—and he’s drunk, okay?

The thing is—yes, he’s drunk, but he’s not so drunk that he doesn’t know himself. Yes, he’s low on blood, critically low, and he knows what that does to him but it’s not like it’s making up things that aren’t there. And right now, all that’s there—all he can feel, all he can think, the sentiment swirling through his head with a tenacity that won’t let any other thoughts through—is how much respect and gratitude and pure adoration he has for these two people. These two—these two who’ve never stopped holding him, reaching for him, and he’s suddenly _so damn scared_ that he’s going to lose that and he doesn’t even know _why_.

“God, I just.” He’s choking on this, like it’s a confession, but it’s not that adoration that he’s loath to admit to—it’s the fear beneath it. “I just, love you both _so much_, and I’m—I don’t want this to change anything.”

“It changes nothing,” Adrian says, breathing against him in the damp, one hand winding into his hair. “Why would it?”

“Even in spite of—”

“Not _in spite_ of it,” Sypha corrects, fingertips tracing patterns on his back, soothing. “We love you because of _everything_ in you, everything you are.”

“For whatever role this part of you has played in making you who you are, in _bringing you to us_,” Adrian says; he sounds almost reverent, splaying a hand open over Trevor’s heart, and Sypha’s joins it, her fingers lacing through Adrian’s. “We love _it,_ too.”

It’s too much—Trevor can admit when he’s beaten, be it by man or beast or his own traitorous heart. It’s quiet and vast here in the baths, and echoes amplify every word, every hitch of breath, every quiet splash of water as they twist closer to one another in the near-dark. The choked off sob that Trevor hears come out of his own chest would be embarrassing in any other circumstances; as loud as it sounds right now, it should be mortifying. 

He cannot find the shame. He cannot find the fear, that familiar terror that comes with any display of weakness, because weaknesses exist to be exploited and that means death or worse, in this world. He cannot find the regrets.

All he can find, all he knows, is the feel of his lovers’ hands on his skin and their bodies propping up his, and safety and warmth and unconditional acceptance and, above all else, _belonging._

Come whatever else may, he is theirs.

* *

It’s a new day—or a new night, whatever. A fresh start? He isn’t drunk anymore, at least.

_Even if you can’t talk to us,_ they’d said to him, after the water had grown chill and they’d all stumbled, damp and cold and clinging to each other, to their bed. They’d burrowed deep, into the blankets and into each other’s space, three bodies twining together like they were trying to be one. _At least talk to_ him.

Which—okay. Okay.

So he finds Leon in the library of all places, which seems odd but it’s good, that works. It’s a dignified space, and these chairs are comfortable, and there will be no table between them, no barriers.

“All right,” Trevor says, dropping into the nearest chair; he hadn’t exactly announced his arrival or his intent, but he knows damn well his ancestor heard him coming from fifty feet away, at least. “I’m ready to try this again.”

“This?” the man asks, a little distracted by the book in his hands; it looks like a journal almost, one of Dracula’s own, and it looks very old. Trevor is, apparently, not the only Belmont who’s just a little bit hung up on the past. 

He’s… he’s _not the only Belmont._ Good god.

“Yeah,” Trevor says, putting that away for now, trying his best not to get distracted. He waves his hand vaguely between them. “This. This story you have to tell, that I ran out on like a coward.”

Leon’s gaze shifts back to the book again for a moment, then back to meet Trevor’s head on. “You’re sure? I don’t want to cause you any more distress.”

“You don’t want me going off and getting drunk off my shits, is what you mean,” Trevor says, leaning forward in the chair, eschewing his usual casual distance. “Don’t worry, that won’t be happening again.”

A small smile, so much like the one in his portrait that for just a second, Trevor’s hit by a wave of dissonance, of _This can’t be right it makes no sense_—then it passes, and he’s here and now, bizarre as the here and now might be. “Learned your lesson?”

“Well, yeah, that and.” He rolls his eyes to cover his embarrassment. “Alucard and Sypha sort of. Locked up the rest of the whiskey.”

“Good for them. They care about you a great deal,” Leon says, eyebrows lifting, and there’s an obvious question in it.

And ugh, god. What _is it_ with vampires and couching everything in coy teasing bullshit? Is he just fishing for confirmation? _Fine_. No more dodging. “Yeah, look, all three of us are fucking, all right?” Trevor can feel the flush rising, refuses to acknowledge it. He won’t be cowed, not about this. “You already _know that_, or you mostly do, so let’s just get that out of the way. I’m here to talk about _your_ story, not my incredibly sensible life choices.”

That little smile grows a bit, becomes a bit more like a smirk, indulgent and knowing and just a little amused. But Leon doesn’t pursue it, thank god. “That’s fair,” he says instead, setting the book aside. “The whole story?”

“The whole story,” Trevor says, and he knows that’s asking a lot, knows it’ll indebt him to tell his own story in return, the story of the ruins out back—but he’ll cross that burning bridge when he comes to it. “No audience, no interruptions. Just us.”

“A family story, shared between family.”

“Yeah,” Trevor says, resting his chin in one hand. “Like it should be, right?”

Leon nods, then leans back in the chair with a pained sigh. “It was… it was 1094, I think—the countryside had become overrun by monsters, and—”

And for the next several hours, Trevor doesn’t move from his chair; he listens, and absorbs, as Leon tells him of his trials and losses, his unlikely allies, his impossible choices—of the way Dracula had let him be thrashed to within a breath of death before intervening with his misguided gift of immortality. How he survived after and the people that helped along the way: the old alchemist who aided him despite his own good judgment; the soft-spoken Celt who knew precisely what he was and still chose to strike up a conversation in the middle of the road that cool, starless night; the moonlight-painted village girl who bludgeoned him with her kindness for months before he was finally overwhelmed. Their children and then grandchildren; Dracula’s control over him, and his decision to sleep until that threat was no more. His _life,_ no matter how small a part of it he’d spent actually _alive_.

So no, Trevor doesn’t move, as much as he wants to run away from this, as much as he wants to pretend it isn’t real. Because it _is_ real, it is damnably real; the man in front of him is not a ghost from a painting or a disconnected, anonymous story from the past. And Trevor is not _okay_ with this yet, not really, but he will at least do his ancestor the service of hearing his story, of supporting him through the grief that he can tell is still lurking there all these centuries later, just under the surface of the words, influencing every choice the man made and every single piece of what their family would eventually become.

* 

* 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, this isn't the end of Trevor's angst! He's still very much Not Okay with these revelations, but a little reminder of the love he's earned just by being who he is has helped him get over his shit enough to at least be able to listen to the damn story.
> 
> Some notes:  
1\. 12 generations actually comes out to more like one drop in FOUR thousand, but that doesn't roll off the tongue as well, so Adrian sacrificed the accuracy of his back-of-the-napkin calculations for the sake of drama. Because he's a fucking vampire.  
2\. Don't imply that Leon is anything less than 110% devoted to his family or your shit will get fucked up. Or maybe you'll just get a stern Look. Hard to say.  
3\. 'Two for joy' is from the nursery rhyme for counting magpies--one for sorrow, two for joy, etc etc. This likely didn't exist until at least the 1600s. I don't care!  
4\. Also, Spots isn't a magpie, she's just a genuinely messed up mutt of a pigeon. Also don't care! Trevor is VERY DRUNK OKAY.  
5\. Dracula's secret whiskey supply courtesy of Graham McTavish's speculations.  
6\. Yes, alcohol is a blood thinner. Don't drink and bleed, kids!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO SORRY this took so long--I had a ton of interviews to do that pretty much destroyed my ability to be a functional human being for a while. I am also sorry this chapter is on the shorter side and spends so little time with our main cast, but the next one should make up for it.
> 
> Warning for implied violence/torture in this chapter. Implied, not written out. This is one of the few things I WILL use a tasteful fade to black for.

*

A slow dripping of water—condensation, surely. The skittering of unnamed, furtive animals in the dark. The walls look like they could cave in at any moment, spiderwebbed as they are with stress fractures and cracks. It all feels perfectly engineered to engender despair, to break down the spirits of those held here, and it probably is—she hasn’t seen any other part of the castle in anything close to this level of neglect and disrepair. Deliberate, then.

Elsewhere in the castle, Sypha supposes, important things are happening. Revelations, reevaluations, conversations dearly needed by all parties. The frustration of missing out on a story that likely rivals most of the ones she holds is nearly a palpable thing, but Trevor is the one that needs to hear it the most. She’ll prod him for the details later.

Trevor, who is still with them despite the efforts of an entire mob of maddened vampires. Despite their efforts to kill both him and Adrian, to leave her alone to pick up those pieces, and it’s possible time or misfortune might still someday succeed where these monsters have failed, but it changes nothing—she will rage that day as she rages now.

Except that _rage_ isn’t quite right, is it? What she feels standing here outside the barred door, locking eyes with this bound, immobilized soldier of Carmilla’s and seeing nothing there worth redeeming, isn’t simple _rage_. Anger is part of it, yes. She has known what her own fury feels like since the day she discovered her fire; has known what it feels like tempered and focused since she first felt ice at her fingertips. 

But it’s also pain, profound pain, at the thought of what today would be like, and tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that, if this demon’s plans had come to fruition. 

And it’s as physical as it is emotional; it feels like a headache would if a headache could run so deep, could exist somewhere between the surface, where most pain lives, and the agony of the heart’s wounds. If it could suffuse through every inch of her body and occupy her every thought, her every breath. She _aches_ with it, this pain of what might have been.

Sypha Belnades is not a cruel person, nor one given to needless violence. But she is also no granter of unearned mercy.

And there are things they need to know, aren’t there?

She slides the bolt on the cell door, lets the rust scrape.

“_You’re_ who the bastard prince sent to execute me?” the vampire snarls; it comes out a little mangled. Adrian’s blow to her head had broken a lot of bones, and it seems her jaw hasn’t healed quite right. She still laughs, laughs in the face of whatever’s coming, laughs at Sypha’s less than intimidating frame, her seeming softness, her lack of weapons. "I think I'm insulted."

"No," Sypha says, stepping into the cell. "He's ordered no such thing."

“Even after what I’ve done?” she sneers, no gratitude forthcoming for the clemency. “They were right, then. He _is_ too soft to lead us. Just a halfbreed _infant_ and his human pets.”

_Soft, _they say. Because anything less than backstabbing, betrayal, and cold hearted murder is simply weakness, in this poisonous, amoral society. Sypha takes a careful breath.

“The little Belmont mutt was _delicious_, you know,” the vampire taunts to fill the silence, baring fangs still crusted with dark, dried blood. “And so afraid. A few more seconds and he would have tasted even better.”

“Is that so.”

A dark, cruel laughter. “Oh, yes. Death honeys the blood, Speaker. The moment when their heart stops? It’s so, _so_ sweet.”

Sypha feels her nails bite into her palm, feels her jaw spasm at how tightly she’s grinding her teeth together, and there must be something in her expression because for just a moment, the vampire’s blood-red eyes go flat with fear.

* *

“Don’t get me wrong, Sypha—I’d like to tear her apart with my bare hands for what she’s done.” Adrian’s hands had clenched and unclenched then, fingers more clawed and sharp and _deadly_ than he ever allows them to be outside of a fight. He’d been so visibly torn, between his feelings and his duty. “She deserves it. But I don't want the first act of our court to be an execution. Nor for torture to become part of our legacy.”

“I am very angry at her,” Sypha had countered, a wild understatement. “I could simply go down and... and express that anger.”

"And whatever happens, happens?" A raised eyebrow, speculative. “Why do I have the suspicion that you won't be using words?”

“I am a Speaker; I will use my words at _first.”_

* *

"So, will it be interrogation, then?" She’s bound at the ankles and the wrists, arms twisted behind her back, and just a few minutes earlier she’d been straining forward on her knees against the chains. Now she doesn’t fight quite as hard—just enough to keep up appearances. A hiss, theatrical. “Do your worst, _little human_. Do it knowing that someone else will succeed where I failed. I’ll give you nothing.”

“You misunderstand,” Sypha says, and she can feel the fury rising in her, buffeting the pain in her eyes and in her voice out into the open air, where it hardens into steel. She pulls the door shut behind her with a heavy clang. “You are going to tell us what we need to know, and I am going to hurt you, for the things you have done—payment for what you tried to take from us." Fire sparks between her fingertips, obedient, burning a bright, ominous white. "These things are not necessarily related.”

There—another flicker of that fear, almost invisible through the indignation and aggression and bloodlust. But it's there.

"If you're going to take your vengeance no matter what I do," the vampire says, slightly more guarded, "then what reason do I have to tell you anything?"

Sypha smiles, and even she can feel the hard-edged falseness of it. She is not cruel—she is not. But she still sees that lurid spatter of blood on the marble floor of the ruins whenever she closes her eyes. She has changed the bandages over and over and the mangled state of the flesh beneath them takes her breath away anew every time she sees it.

She is not cruel, but cruelty requires an undeserving target. This is a creature, a monster, and she nearly took away everything Sypha holds dear—and then had the audacity to gloat over it.

And this may not be, as her grandfather would say, _a Speaker thing._ But apart from her family and closest friends, her own people already look at her askance, already see her action against Dracula’s hordes, her willingness to _fight_, as distasteful at best, unconscionable at worst. No one would go so far as to openly condemn her, not after she helped literally save the world, but she’s heard the odd whisper: _A disgrace to the Codrii,_ they say. _Too much like her father._

She has always, _always_ been different.

One step forward, fire blistering the very air between them. The vampire draws back, chains going slack, white flames reflecting the now very real stab of fear in her eyes.

"Because," Sypha says, even and slow. "If you do, I will try my very hardest not to _kill_ you as well."

* *

The greatest limitation of the human mind—and of the vampire mind, the dhampir mind, any sentient mind really—is that it cannot construct a world beyond what it is currently experiencing. Sypha _knows_ that while she was away, Trevor and Adrian cut wood and built defenses and had meals together and probably had their fair share of spats. She knows that while she was in the woods saving Adrian’s skin, Trevor was fighting for his life—and losing. And she knows that right now, while she takes another step toward their prisoner with rage and fire in her eyes, Trevor is hearing yet another family tragedy to add to the collection and Adrian is off on the grounds looking for clues to the broken wards, and farther out there, there are forces at work that will affect her life that she does not even have names for.

Snowy afternoons by the fire. Blood on marble. Old scars and new wounds and enemies they hoped they wouldn’t have to face.

A wolf, muzzle as wet with portent as with blood.

But she cannot _feel_ any of those things, not in the way she would if she’d lived them. She cannot _be_ in the library with Trevor, a supportive hand on his shoulder, his back; she cannot tread through the muddied snow with Adrian and know what he has or hasn’t found. Her world is her world, and at the moment, it is narrowed to this dark, close, miserable place. Nothing beyond that exists.

But there’s always something else happening.

* *

* *

In the deep woods, there are things that become obvious, become clear, even as the undergrowth tangles denser and denser and conspires to rob a man of his sight, of the surety of his steps. Things that nature has to teach, about cycles and time and life and death and blood in the night, staining the snow black.

The way a wounded fox moves differently than a wounded rabbit, its thrashing purposeful, in denial of the inevitable—being hunted never surprises a rabbit.

Where fear comes from, and why humans have always feared dark places.

How it is possible to see shelter, to see safety, where none exists—just because there’s something there blocking out the stars.

The castle had been a shelter, once—an actual shelter, one in which he’d been safe, so long as he didn’t do anything foolish. Which he’d done, repeatedly—one mistake after another, each a hasty attempt to repair the damage done by the last. Since then, many things have blotted out the night sky above him, but not once has he known safety.

He has been forced to kill his share of foxes, lately.

Quiet steps follow him, flank him, as he moves through the leafless brush. He isn’t concerned. They’re friends, after all—a hoof in the snow here, the soft pad of a predator’s paw there. Nothing unexpected, nothing out of place.

“Found anything useful?” he asks, quiet. They may not understand his words, but they understand his _intent_. 

The stag emerges first, gracefully navigating the overhanging vegetation in a way that shouldn’t have been possible even when it was properly alive. It nuzzles into his outstretched hand, snorting in frustrated affection. It has found nothing. It usually finds nothing—a deer’s instincts aren’t what he needs right now, though the beast has had its moments. He still strokes its neck, speaks soothingly to it until its temper settles.

The cat is next, some sort of wild creature a bit larger than those that people keep as pets, fur spotted and dense and paws broad and suited to the snow. She’s carrying a rabbit in her teeth—a gift, no doubt. It’s not as if she needs to eat, but instincts die hard. He thanks her, packs the rabbit away in his bag, but it isn’t what he’d been hoping for.

Hector is, he’s embarrassed to say, utterly lost. Fortunate then, that the company he keeps doesn’t demand he say it aloud.

To be fair, he has been lost for a good long while, now—chasing rumors, leads, his own metaphorical tail. And it’s not that he knows nothing of living and travelling alone. He’d avoided his fellow man’s flaws and cruelties for many years and in doing so, avoided their assistance as well. But he cannot see the stars and his map is unreliable in this part of the country, so close to the foothills. And all he has is a name, the name of a town, one gleaned from a thousand rumors and snatches of overheard conversation—a place so insignificant as to be on very few maps. Acasă.

That’s where the castle’s been seen. Supposedly. It may still be there, it may not be, but Hector feels an undeniable pull toward his old home, no matter that he’d betrayed its master. Maybe he wants access to his tools and resources. Maybe he wants to find out who _did it_ and do something about that—but he doesn’t think so. God above, maybe he just wants some closure. He won’t let himself consider that Carmilla had lied to him about Dracula’s death—every other thing she’d said had been a lie, but he knows well the danger of unreasonable hope, these days.

But first, before any of that, he has to get himself less lost, get out on the right side of these damned woods.

A cawing overhead—the raven’s returned from the depths of the afternoon shadows, a scrap of dyed merchant’s wool in his beak, lit up a brilliant violet by the blue glow of the bird’s eyes. Merchants. Civilization? 

He charts the raven’s trajectory in his mind, gets his bearings—sets out.

* *

Outside the makeshift infirmary, Jeanne takes a moment to lean against the timbers holding the tenting in place and just—sighs. It’s a deep, bone-weary sound, and she presses a hand to her eyes, trying as always to banish the memories.

There’s a reason Julia always asks for her help in these difficult cases, despite the fact that she’s far more a fighter than a magician—none of the humans have the endurance for it, and dhampir seem to have more innate magic than vampires, or at least more of the type that their resident healer has an affinity for. That’s something she’s never understood, and had been hoping to speak to Alucard about. If they’d actually had time to talk. If his attention hadn’t been immediately drawn away to other matters.

A ‘family emergency’, he’d called it, but as far as she knows he doesn’t _have_ any family left and he’d been awfully cagey, and—

She thinks about the Belmont, and the Speaker, and the strange vampire they’d come back from the ruins with, and there’s the shape of something there but it’s like it’s black drawn on black and she can’t pick out its edges.

A shriek echoes from the fabric-shrouded interior, distracting her from her contemplations, and god but it never gets easier to listen to the screams. She sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be kinder to just let them die—or hell, get someone to come turn them. If that’s what they want. She figures it’s what she’d want in their position, but hey, she’s biased.

“How is he doing?”

She looks up, feels more than sees Isabel shifting through the trees. Checking in on her wounded, even the ones most would write off as such short-lived chattel as to be beneath worry—and some vampires claim that evil is simply in their nature. It’s laughable, really.

“He’s alive,” she says, running a hand through her hair. “Julia saved him—she really is a miracle worker.”

“You both saved him.”

Jeanne rolls her eyes. This again. “All I do is stand there and act like a magical well—she’s the one who knows what she’s doing.”

“And yet—she couldn’t do it without you.”

“Under every hero’s sweaty armpit is a crutch?”

An arched lift of that dark, delicate brow. Through the trees, the sun is still high but it’s diving, and Isabel knows well how to keep to the shadows. “It would seem so,” she says, gesturing with a jerk of her head to say _walk with me_. “Even the leader we travelled all this way to see lets his strength depend, at least in part, upon the skills of others.”

Jeanne frowns, considers. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Not at all.” Isabel’s mouth tweaks up into a grim smile. “It’s just good to see there’s substance behind the threats.”

That stops Jeanne cold. Threats? As far as she’s been told, this alliance is an amicable one, but if… “When did he threaten you?”

Isabel waves her hand, dismissive. “He didn’t, not directly. But his right hand man is a Belmont and a hunter, of all ridiculous things, and I suspect _strongly_ that any vampire not explicitly on their side is going to be seen as fair game.”

“Hunters hunt.”

“They do.”

“Is that the real reason we allied with them?” Jeanne asks, feeling oddly cautious; it’s not that she fears Isabel’s response. Fear isn’t how they do things, here. But she knows this has the potential to sting.

Isabel looks at her for a moment, considering her out of the corner of her eye, sidelong in the shadows. “Of course not,” she says finally, and her tone gives away nothing. “I’ve always been honest about my goals—with all of you, _and_ with them. But an extra measure of safety for us isn’t something to ignore.”

Safety. She pictures the look on the Belmont’s face as he did the work he was born for—cold, closed down, an icy, impersonal kind of aggression—but also the way he’d looked when he’d been struggling to save Isabel from the downpour. A contradiction: fury and compassion, hunter and protector.

It’s the first rule of living with humans, she knows: don’t try to work them out, just appreciate their complexity and do your best to keep up. 

They walk in silence for a bit, after that. These temporary camps tend to all blend—there’s only so many ways you can set up shelters among the trees, and forests are, by and large, all the same. It’s easy to drift, out here.

Still, there are some things that stand out. There on the left: the living shelters, housing individuals and pairs and families and other, less conventional collections of their people. The tent Johannes keeps with his granddaughter; the Herlea clan, a full half of them humans; Luca and Mireli’s shelter, warm rich smells of the southern food Luca cooks for himself wafting out, all earthy spiciness and oily richness, beans and bread and artichokes and wine. Through the tentcloth, the cooking fire casts them into silhouette, leaning into each other’s space in silence. That’s one family reunited in their home instead of the infirmary tent, at least; one human she managed to bring home safe.

Really, she brought most of them through that fight. But even one failure, one near-fatal mistake, is beginning to eat at her; Isabel had trusted her with them, _they_ had trusted her.

And can she even really claim credit for the others’ survival? When it had been the addition of Alucard’s blades to the fray, and the Speaker’s magic, and the Belmont’s uncanny whip, that had kept the majority of them alive? The way they had _torn through_ the attackers, efficient and brutal, the Belmont more so than anyone else—the trail of bodies like a scorched, bloodied banner winding out behind him and marking his progress through the mob. Yes, hunters hunt, and she’s met hunters before, or people who _claimed_ to be hunters, but the Belmont—

No. Whatever implicit threats Alucard’s taking advantage of in making his alliances, they are not even remotely empty. The thought, strangely, inspires more wonder than anxiety.

“They’re something though, aren’t they?” she asks, and immediately hates how juvenile it sounds, like a child with their first wooden sword looking up at the statues of their heroes, unwilling to consider that they could ever disgrace the stone. She knows better, she _does._ But there’s a part of her that doesn’t want to believe there’s nothing at work here but cynical politics.

“Oh, they are,” Isabel says, airy. “But we knew that. They killed Dracula—I know that’s tossed around a lot, very matter of fact, but think about the actual enormity of that, for a moment.”

It’s almost too big to really grasp, but that isn’t what Jeanne had been getting at. “I mean—it’s more that—”

“I know,” Isabel interrupts, and something in her tone has changed, softened. Quietly: “They could have let me die. It was no one’s mistake but mine. They still went out of their way to protect me—I’m not blind to that.” She smiles, a little slyly. “My cynicism gets away from me sometimes. It’s good I have you young things around to pull me out of it.”

Jeanne rolls her eyes—she’ll be fifty next month, so no child by anyone’s reckoning, but to a vampire elder? A rowdy teen, if they’re being generous. “I’m so glad I’m able to perform such fulfilling services for our cause as ‘standing there doing nothing while Julia heals people’ and ‘telling our leader to get her head out of her arse now and then’.”

“You’re also fairly good at waving sharpened metal sticks around.”

A laugh, then, and they lapse back into silence. Another scream echoes from the infirmary; gut wounds are never fun or pretty, but they are far enough away that it’s lost its shrill, agonized edge. She thinks about families divided and families brought back together, thinks about a future where they might not have to hide in the woods like animals just to live and love as they see fit. She thinks about the marks on the Belmont’s throat and about Brigid back at their tent, waiting with her arms always open no matter the hour.

“They really might be the ones, you think?” Jeanne finally asks, looking straight ahead, into the sunlight, gaze boring through the lengthening shadows between the trees that could, she supposes, hide just about anything. 

A nod, out of the corner of her eye. “They may be. Yes.”

* *

* *

It’s been a brilliantly clear day in the port town of Braila—a rarity in the winter months, and one that the locals cherish when it happens, spilling into slush-covered streets in the early morning, clearing their walkways with weathered old brooms, letting their children cavort freely. Winter here by the water is more often than not grey and miserable, endlessly so. Today, though, the sun has beat down with a determination that’s almost felt purposeful—as if the very weather and the sky above were conspiring to give him the best possible cover.

He’s no stranger to hazard, no stranger to resistance; in the last year he’s been no stranger to carpentry either, helping the town rebuild the homes and buildings lost in the bizarre dancing castle incident back in the spring. But for a day, he’s put the hammer down; it’s his skills as an informant that are needed most now.

_If you see hide or hair of Carmilla in this town again,_ Belmont had said to him, the roar of the crowd deafening them all, rush of the jailbreak still jamming up all their senses and rendering the world brighter, louder, more pungent with fear. _Or any other vampire activity, really. Get word to us._

_How?_ he’d asked; orchestrating a mass prison escape in the wake of a world-class distraction is one thing. Tracking two people down across leagues? That’s something else. It hadn’t been that he’d been reluctant to help—as short a time as he’d known them, he’d liked those two, felt like he’d always been meant to run across them, somehow. It’d just seemed an impossible feat.

They’d been separated then, split apart by the tide of the crowd and the efforts of what few loyal soldiers Carmilla had still had on her side—but months later a letter had arrived, with the name of a town where they could be found and a reiteration of the request: any vampire nonsense in Braila, _especially_ involving Carmilla, and he’s to send a message to them immediately.

He’s glad, standing here by the water today, to know that they made it away safely, that they’ve found a place to settle, that the tone of the letter had been light despite its content. That they seemed, by omission if nothing else, to be happy.

He’s less glad to have the folded bit of parchment in his pocket, penned with the news he’d been hoping to never have to send: vampires in Carmilla’s colors, creeping about the streets at night—no deaths yet, but it’s only a matter of time and everyone knows it. Their purpose is unknown, their loyalties uncertain but easy to guess at, their plans a mystery. But they’re here.

It’s unsettling. It’s...wait. What’s—

Turning his back to the water, he eyes the shadows along the edge of the dock. Again. He’s meeting his messenger here, the runner who will take his missive to Acasă, but he keeps—he keeps seeing _something_ out of the corner of his eye, down there hidden in the grey-blue shade of the pilings. At times it looks almost like a man, as dark as the shadows he hides in; at other times like a _wrong thing_, a creature with disjointed features and glinting red eyes, massive and hunched and burnished in darkness. 

But every time he trains his eyes directly on the shadows, he finds them empty—just a deepened darkness gathered in the dock’s lee. River water and mud and rocks, and nothing else. Nothing there in the darkness that isn’t there in the light?

Grant knows enough, now, to never believe that again.

But there’s nothing to be done for it if he can’t _find_ the damn thing, and right now, he needs to focus on getting this message to its destination.

* *

“There,” a voice whispers from one set of shadows or another; darkness is its own isolated world, and the exact wheres and whens rarely matter. The voice is urgent, confident, commanding. “_Follow_.”

A beating of leathery wings, then silence.

* *

* *

When Sypha emerges from the castle basements, when she finally allows her perception of the world to shift back to a place where life thrives and the sun shines down and love exists, she feels unfit for it—grimy with dirt and blood and worse, moving as if her skin’s gone stiff and ill-fitting around her, like she doesn’t dare touch anything or even breathe too deeply lest she contaminate the very air with the ashy aftermath of _what she’s just done_.

It had to be done. It didn’t _have_ to be done, but it did—otherwise they’d all feel like they’d let the demon off too lightly for her crimes, like perhaps her crimes weren’t so severe, and that would eat at them. This guilt, this filthy feeling of having done things anathema to her beliefs—it’s a burden she’ll gladly bear for Adrian and Trevor, so that they don’t have to carry it.

She’s being selfless. She’s shouldering this for _them_. It _had to be—_

It was a _necessary—_

They need to _know—_

...no. This is her, running circles in her head around the truth.

The truth is, she’d been so _angry. _She isn’t sure she could have stood the weight of her own rage for much longer. Now that anger is a deflated thing, flopping about behind her as if in a stiff winter wind, and she feels… lessened. Dirty. She _is_ dirty, in every literal sense, but that’s not all it is.

She stops in the stairwell, closes her eyes. Sighs, because that is, at least, something she can address; the rest will have to wait.

To the baths first, then. There should be water left down there for her to heat, not enough for a full soak but enough for her to, at very least, begin to feel human again.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY WOW LOTS OF PEOPLE, HI HECTOR! HI GRANT! HI JULIA! 
> 
> HI.... SYPHA'S RAGING PROTECTIVE TEMPER?
> 
> Wow. That sure was a thing that happened. I bet there won't be any fallout from that at all, huh?


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, have my favorite sex scene I've ever written. Take it, and enjoy.

*

If it takes a while for Sypha to begin to feel clean again, to begin to feel vaguely human, it takes even longer for her to begin to feel like herself. Standing in the cold, echoing space that the baths have become, warming herself with double handfuls of searing water until her skin starts to go an angry pink, she realizes: it is not an issue of being at ease with what she’s done. She will never be at ease with it, probably _should_ never be at ease with it. Her responsibility right now is to own and accept her actions, her emotions, without trying to spread accountability around.

She’d felt powerful, in the grips of that anger—but sometimes power is just the feeling of not being held back, and some restraints exist for a reason.

She knows that Trevor has done some questionable things, that Adrian has as well, but they all have different moral centers and so much of this is relative. The vampire had deserved everything Sypha had done, anything any of them _could_ do to hurt her. But does that make all things equal?

Like a litany, the things she’d found out circle through her head on an endless, damning loop. The attack_ was _just a test run. Yes, they _had_ broken her wards. No, she hadn’t been privy as to how. Yes, they know about the Belmonts’ big family secret. Yes, Carmilla was behind this. Not a big surprise, but good to know regardless.

Yes, they’d been told to kill whoever they found in the castle, indiscriminate extermination, but Alucard and Trevor had had particular death orders on their heads. Likely the only reason she’d been exempted is because they hadn’t expected her to be there.

The water is cold, in its basin. It is the fire in her hands and her heart that heats it, brings it nearly to a boil before she can even lift it to her skin. In the mirror, her face looks scrubbed raw from the heat. Her hair is disheveled and damp. She looks tired, maybe. Nothing else.

Still, she knows that there was something dark that went with her into that cell, and she isn’t sure she’d left it there, nor has all this washing cleaned it away. The others would have insight, perhaps—they’ve always been good judges of that sort of thing. Shades of grey. The mutability of right and wrong, and where that line is, and what things cross it—when it _stops_ being ambiguous.

And she has information to share. And she has information to receive, from them. And she _wants_ to see them, to hold them warm and alive and breathing in her arms. Sometimes it’s really that simple.

She ties on one of the plush dressing gowns hanging on the pegs on the wall and makes her way upstairs.

* *

When she opens the bedroom door, Sypha stays there in the doorway for a long moment, just _looking_. It’s late afternoon, last remnants of the winter sun filtering jaggedly through the stonework of the window frame, and there’s a stillness in the room she feels oddly hesitant to disturb. Trevor’s there, undressed and sprawled bonelessly across the blankets, arm thrown across his face like he’s trying to block something out. The bandages at his neck are stark white against the tawniness of his skin, and at this distance, it’s hard to see that he’s breathing. She has no reason to worry that he isn’t, but...

_Death honeys the blood,_ she remembers, and then Adrian, months ago: _There’s no accounting for taste._

_I can account for it, _Trevor had countered, all arrogant bluster. _They’re horrible._

_Horrible_, he’d said, but it’s too mild a word. Sypha thinks that perhaps only evil, freely chosen, can twist their tastes so thoroughly, can let them find pleasure in something so grotesque.

_The moment their heart stops—_

Then the figure on the bed grumbles a little, rolls vaguely toward her—reaches to rub the sleep from his eyes. “...hey,” he mumbles, blinking; Sypha feels a knot in her chest unclench.

And she needs something, deeply and very suddenly—needs to be in those blankets with him, needs to touch warm flesh and feel the pulsing of blood beneath the skin and know that this really was a near-miss, a catastrophe averted. She needs _him_, and she needs Adrian too—as much as Trevor’s injuries have taken the spotlight, she still cannot forget how helplessly Adrian had been pinned in his wild, delirious state, before she’d been able to burn the other soldier off of him. How much danger he’d been in, in that instant—

And she’d missed them. For two weeks they’d been apart, and her skin is starving for theirs in a way she’d never thought possible.

“I like that look,” Trevor murmurs, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

She sits down on the edge of the bed, barely containing the urge to just sprawl at his side and sink into him. “What look?”

“That—” he says, lifting one hand to gesture vaguely at her face. “That look. Like you haven’t eaten in days and I’m, I don’t know, chicken stew or something.”

“That is a terrible metaphor,” she says, but she can’t help leaning in to take a taste of him anyway, a gentle, softly seeking kiss, pressing deep into his warmth. He groans into her mouth, shameless as always about the effect she has on him, and maybe she’s not the only one who’s been missing things. 

“Where’s Adrian?” she asks softly against his cheek, once they come up for air.

Concern creases Trevor’s brow, and he turns to look over his shoulder, to the other side of the bed. “He’s… he _was_ here. Where the hell did he—”

“I’m right here,” comes Adrian’s voice from behind her; he’s slipped into the room silently, carrying a tankard in one hand. “I was just retrieving some more water for the recalcitrant convalescent.”

“_Hey_,” Trevor protests.

But Adrian continues, ignoring him except to hand off the water. “How’s our guest?”

Sypha bites her lip, swallows. The ruminations of the last few hours rear up again, like a creature spooked by a prodding stick. “Alive?”

“Well, that’s… that was the goal, I suppose,” Adrian says, hesitant. “Did you learn anything useful?”

“I think so—”

“Wait,” Trevor interrupts, more forcefully this time. He’s grinning, a little shaky. “You beat the shit out of her for me, didn’t you?”

She feels her cheeks color, knows it for the honest shame it is. “I… might have been a _bit_ aggressive…”

Trevor just laughs, though, rolling his head on the pillow. It isn’t the reaction she’d been expecting but… “Fuck,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “You’re incredible, you know that?”

Incredible. From the Latin, _credibilis_. Impossible to believe. She wouldn’t have believed herself capable of this, either, but she knows that isn’t how he means it.

“She really is,” Adrian agrees, finally sitting on the edge of the bed himself, taking Sypha’s hand into his own. For a moment, they’re all quiet, the two of them regarding her in gratitude, in something close to awe. 

She could say it now: this was wrong. She let her anger control her. They shouldn’t be looking at her like this, like she’s done something wonderful for them, like she—

—they’ve watched her fight and kill on their behalves before. They’ve watched her impale her opponents with spikes of ice; she’s had a dying man’s face in her flaming palm, and didn’t think twice about incinerating him.

Is this different? It feels different. She could say that now; she _should_ say that now.

Instead, before the moment can unravel, before she can drown in the rising tide of her own doubts or any of them can decide that now isn’t the time, Sypha reaches over and pulls Adrian to her, kissing him as hard as she dares, with no less ferocity than he’d brought to bear on her the night of their reunion. He moans happily, melts against her, ceding all his control and she feels amazing for a moment, like she’s been given such power, power to protect and power to avenge and power to _love_, and then.

And then Trevor, pout clear in his voice, has to complain. “Wow, that’s...I’m kind of jealous.”

A laugh against her mouth, Adrian muttering something there that sounds almost like _Of who?_

Sypha laughs too, pulling away just enough that she’s speaking against Adrian’s lips and not into his mouth. “I was going _easy_ on you, Trevor. Out of respect for your injured state.”

“I’m not _that _injured,” he grumbles, finishing off the water and setting it aside.

Adrian leans away from her, considers. “You’re really not, are you?” He reaches to thread slender fingers through Trevor’s hair, to turn it against the fading sunlight until it brings out the lighter, redder brown that streaks through it in the right light. That’s something Sypha hadn’t seen until the two of them had been on the road a few weeks, until the snowmelt had passed and the creeks and ponds grew warm enough to bathe in. It’d been covered up by all the grime and grease and misery before, weighed down by it.

So much had been weighing him down, back then.

“At least,” Adrian continues, letting that fringe of hair flop back into place, “not as injured as you should be. Anyone else would have been flat on their back these past two days, if they survived at all.”

_A few more seconds,_ the slurred voice in her head taunts. _And he would have—_

Something of that must cross her expression, because Adrian looks up at her, then back to Trevor. “Never mind,” he says, clearly mistaking the source of her discomfort. “I shouldn’t bring that up—I know it’s a sensitive topic right now.”

Trevor takes a deep breath, blows it out sharply, ruffling his own hair. “Did you know?” he asks again, and Sypha can tell that however Adrian answers this time, it will be accepted, and this will be the end of it. “Honestly.”

“No,” Adrian says, unhesitating. “I truly didn’t. As blind and stupid as that obviously makes me.”

A considering silence, then Trevor laughs harshly, letting the poignancy of the moment evaporate. “Then no, it’s all right. I mean, it’s not, but… hell, if his fuckup is the reason I got to the other side of this alive, then I guess if nothing else I should be grateful for _that_.”

"I think _fuckup _is a little strong,” Sypha says, “given what we know of what happened."

A low whistle. "I just got the whole story and, uh, yes, mistakes were made," Trevor says, carefully not looking away from the ceiling. "Dracula being a huge arsehole was definitely the biggest issue, though."

Adrian winces; it’s likely Trevor doesn’t even see it. "Then perhaps the first mistake was in choosing what company to keep."

“I guess. They were kids together, though—and I’m just not getting my head around that. Not just Dracula as a human, but Dracula as a _kid_. God, he must have been a terror.”

“Trevor…” Sypha says, a little warningly, because Adrian is drawing into himself further with each word, is looking a little like a dog who’s been kicked already and is expecting the blows to keep landing.

“It’s just—how do you _do that_ to someone, when they’re sitting there _begging_ you not to_?_”

“I wouldn’t know,” Adrian finally says, tone chilly, and that’s what it takes for Trevor to snap out of staring at the ceiling and realize that hey, there are other people here and they do actually have feelings and he might, possibly, be hurting them with his implications.

“Shit,” he says, focusing on Adrian. “God, no, of course you wouldn’t. Sorry, I wasn’t trying to...”

A contemplative silence, then Adrian sighs, reaching to touch Trevor’s hair again, the side of his face, the line of his scar. “It’s fine,” he says, even if it isn’t. “Our families have a difficult history—my progenitor did yours a great injustice. There’s no way to be delicate about all of it.”

“How are _you_ doing with all of this?” Sypha asks, because they have all had their own traumas, today. “You don’t seem to be drunk _or_ on the roof, so I will count that as an improvement, but beyond that…”

Trevor takes a long, careful breath, then finally looks up and meets both their gazes. “I’m… I’m fine. Could be worse—I could be descended from an actual crazy murder vampire instead of,” he waves his hand in the air, circling. “Whatever this is.”

“He _is_ very nice,” Sypha says, stretching out alongside him, snagging a pillow. “I didn’t actually know they could be so… pleasant.”

Adrian sniffs in pretended offense. “Sypha Belnades, are you painting an entire species and culture with one brush?”

“Look,” she says, sitting back up, then starts ticking them off on her fingers. “‘Politeness’ and ‘Trying to rip my face off’ are somewhat mutually exclusive. And every other vampire I have met has tried very hard to rip my face off.”

“That’s just because they don’t know you,” Trevor says, syrupy warm.

“Thank you—”

“If they _did,_ they’d know to go for your tongue first,” he appends, grinning wickedly, and her gratitude sputters out into something indignant. Oh, he is _looking_ for trouble, is he? Fine.

“I can think of a better use for it,” she says, teasing, leaning over him—then she kisses him hard, hard like he wants, like he’d said he was so jealous of. His body pulls tight under her weight, warming, molding to her; his solidity is a comfort, his realness. She can feel his heart hammering under her hands, feel his fingers where they seek under the dressing gown, run rough and warm along her sides and lower, to where she’s still damp from the baths. Heat pools there, dizzying.

It isn’t the time. They don’t know they’re safe, there are so many serious things hanging over them—it isn’t the right time, but it is also _exactly_ the right time. She needs this.

“Do you think,” she asks against his mouth, “that you are un-injured enough for _stuff_?”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Trevor laughs, head dropping back to the bed, beyond exasperated. “_Stop calling it that_. Yes, I can fucking get it up, if that’s what you’re asking. Assuming _Dr. Tepes_ here doesn’t have any objections.”

_Dr. Tepes_. Six months ago, that might have been a misstep, might have darkened Adrian’s mood more quickly than the sooty clouds of a coming storm. Now, he just laughs, with only a faint shine in his eyes hinting at the sadness that never fully leaves him. “Far be it from me to tell you what to do.”

“I don’t know how, ah, energetic I can really be, though—”

“Trevor,” she says, swinging a leg over him to straddle his hips, pushing the blankets aside—drags herself along his length, bites her lip at the way he whimpers, the way he starts to harden against her. “You nearly died. You’ve earned some laziness. I will do all the work—I promise.”

In the corner of her vision, Adrian cocks his head to one side, and she can tell he is about to protest that arrangement.

“Adrian can help,” she gets in ahead of him, and the contrariness she’d seen blooming dissolves into a wicked grin; beneath her, Trevor mirrors it, flush climbing up his face.

“Well, if you put it that way,” he manages, before she leans over him—swallows up whatever other words he has left.

She’s still kissing him when she hears the fabric shuffling of Adrian shedding his shirt; still kissing him when she feels the bed dip behind her, feels leather-clad thighs nestle up behind hers and cool flesh press to her back. Hands on her hips, thumbing her hipbones. Sharpness at her throat, but not pain—just a scrape, just a _tease_.

“You know,” Adrian hums against her neck, cool hands sliding down her thighs and then back up again, folding into her heat, urging her to open herself more fully. “Trevor and I talked about this a great deal, while you were gone.”

She chews her lip, pictures it: the two of them in this bed, making love and lost in each other and still, her name on their lips. “Did you?”

“Mmhm. What we wanted to do with you, when you returned. What did we decide on, Trevor?” he asks, all innocence. But he rocks against her back then, driving her onto Trevor’s thickness—not all the way down, just enough for her to really _feel_ it, to feel the stretch, the beat of blood under the skin in time with his heart under her hands. It wrings a gasp from Trevor that draws out into an impatient whine, and she clenches around him, hums in contentment and in pleasure.

“Trevor?” she asks, her voice a little strained, because Trevor is clearly too distracted to even remember he’s been asked a question. To his credit, he does _try_ to focus on her, but Adrian’s rocking steadily against them both now, working them more fully together in short, quick little nudges, all the while running damp fingers through her folds and along Trevor’s length, and Trevor? Looks like his brain’s about to start dripping out through his ears. 

“Whatever—ahhh,” he says eventually, giving a little jerk of his hips, finally seating them flush; his work there done, Adrian lets his hands roam up the flat of her belly, curling around the taut curve of her breasts. Trevor’s eyes track the motion, hungry; one of his hands settles alongside Adrian’s, and the feel of both of them, of Trevor’s rough, messy heat and Adrian’s porcelain chill, touching her and savoring her, together and different and the _same_ and—

“Whatever you want most,” Trevor finally manages, sounding like he’s not sure he believes he’s really here. “Nothing else sounded as good as that.”

Whatever she wants. Sypha hums, considering; she thinks about all those nights of quiet, desperate loneliness, about the cold wind and the scratchiness of her wool robes, about the ache of lovers separated. She rolls her hips, lets herself really feel how deeply he’s touching her, the fullness and the burn of pleasure there, the sheer closeness of it—is there any other way one person can get this tangled in another without getting their hands bloody?—and she knows: this is exactly what she wants, exactly what she needs.

From both of them.

“Adrian,” she says, soft, reaching around behind her to cup the back of his head, to draw him over her shoulder where she doesn’t have to raise her voice. 

He hums questioningly against her throat, nuzzling under an ear. “Decided, then?”

“I want you, too.”

A light, indulgent chuckle. “I’ll get in line.”

“No,” she says, heat rising up her cheeks and she isn’t even sure if it’s because of Trevor’s efforts, clutching her hips and rocking up into her and looking at her like she’s a divine revelation he doesn’t deserve to be witness to, or if it’s because of what she’s asking for. “At the same time.”

A breath of silence.

“...Sypha…”

“Don’t start,” she says, a little sharp, rolling into one of Trevor’s thrusts, interrupting herself with a breathy moan that doesn’t seem to know when to end. “...ah, my god. If—if Trevor can handle it, so can I.”

Trevor shudders hard at that, at the reminder, maybe feeling the phantom sensation of Adrian at his back, maybe just appreciating the mental image. 

“Shh,” she says, setting her own hands on his, stilling them on her hipbones. _Stop_, she’s saying. Just for a moment. And he does, he goes completely still, but he doesn’t do it without protest—a drawn out whine that he’d be ashamed of in any other circumstances. To Adrian: “I know you can be gentle. I have seen you be gentle with him.”

“You’ve also seen me _wreck_ him.”

Another little sound, this one desperate, almost pleading.

Sypha runs her hands over Trevor's fingers, soothingly—rubs at his forearms, follows the line of them until she has her hands splayed across his chest, fingers threading through the dark hair there. “Is that a bad thing?” she asks, teasing. “He seems to _enjoy_ it.”

“Trevor has good reason to enjoy it; you’re lacking that bit of anatomy.”

“You are too, though, aren’t you?”

He stills against her back, the slow, ponderous thud of his heart seeming to pick up time. “I’m… I’m not set up inside to match the outside, no.” Cautious. Wary, like in the old days. Sypha can feel her heart crack for him; she hadn’t meant to— “Not entirely, anyway. How—how did you know that?”

She shrugs against him, doing her best to keep this light, casual. Harmless. “I have read a bit about flesh alchemy—enough to recognize its handiwork when I see it—”

“Yes, yes,” Trevor moans, impatient. “We all love books and magic, hooray for books and magic, now can we fucking get _on_ with this? I’m dying, here.”

“Hush.” Sypha leans to press a kiss to Trevor’s forehead—then clamps down around him until his eyes cross. “I am trying to win an argument,” she says, and Trevor drops his head back to the pile of pillows in defeat; he sounds a little like he’s been punched in the gut. 

“My point,” she continues, glancing over her shoulder, “is that you _also_ seem to enjoy it, when Trevor takes _you_.”

“As rare an occasion as that is,” Adrian complains, faux-sullen.

She giggles; she can’t help it. "Yes, when we can pry him out from under you."

“Oh, fuck you,” Trevor grinds out through tightly clenched teeth, obviously trying hard not to squirm. “People _like things_, you know?”

Sypha laughs, explosively and brightly; the laughter feels like it’s riding a wave of pressure that’s building up in her core, making her throat go tight and her gut clench. She rolls against him again, to punctuate it. “_People like things_. That’s about as eloquent as _stuff_.”

“Do you expect more from him?” Adrian adds, a valiant attempt to change the subject, which she is not going to let him get away with, not even a little. “In his current circumstances, no less—”

“My point,” she interrupts, “is that if you like it, I should like it too.”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow—”

“Oh, for sweet fucking—” Trevor says, lifting his head to meet Adrian’s gaze over her shoulder. “She’s not asking for it because she thinks it’s going to be some world shattering experience, she’s asking for it because she _wants you close_. Why do I have to explain this shit? You need an engraved invitation or something?”

Silence again, as Adrian contemplates this.

“Wait,” Trevor says, breathless and grinning after his outburst. “_Do you? _You know, because—”

“_No_,” Adrian interrupts, and Sypha would swear under pain of death that she can _hear_ his eyes roll. “I do not.”

“Because vampires _usually_ need an invitation if they want to come inside—”

“_Trevor,”_ Sypha says, and she’s trying to be sharp because oh my god did he really just—did he _actually_—but she can’t stop _laughing_, suddenly. She can’t even see straight.

“Ugh, don’t laugh,” Adrian says, leaning away from her to fuss at the nightstand. She can hear in his voice that he’s fighting it too. “You’ll only encourage him.”

“Come on, that was funny.”

“That, Belmont, was the worst vampire joke _and_ the worst sex joke I’ve ever heard.”

“Maybe, but it was also both of them at once, which has to count for _something_.”

“Oh ho,” Sypha says, leaning forward to grind against Trevor, savoring the delicious push-pull, the shift and the slide and the pressure. Under the heat of her gaze, he bites his lip hard, struggles to stay still. “He called you _Belmont_. You are in trouble now, Trevor.”

But in trouble or not, he’s still smiling up at her, still gazing at her with all the adoration she’s ever seen in any one person’s eyes. Despite all the teasing she’s done. Despite how she’s forced him still, kept him in the shallows of pleasure without letting him dive deeper, letting him seek gratification—he is still radiantly, unselfconsciously in love with her. 

Even after she—

They came so close to—

Sypha closes her eyes, takes a breath. Centers herself. She knows she’ll have to be still for Adrian at first, but she’s suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness for the man beneath her and it’s not enough that he’s merely accepting this or tolerating it—he should be enjoying every second of it, as she is. She drops against his body, hands on either side of him—then slips down to her elbows, hands winding up behind his head, tangling into his hair, pulling him up so she can kiss him senseless. And there’s a… a _complexity_ to kissing Trevor that she hasn’t experienced with anyone else, a complicated layering of defensive walls that drop one by one, that let her in further and deeper the longer she keeps at it. It’s easy to get lost in, even as she feels the first cold shock of Adrian’s slicked fingers, pressing against her, pressing _into_ her.

“You’re sure about this,” he murmurs from behind her, even as he sinks knuckle-deep.

She rocks shallowly, first away from the pressure and then drawn back toward it, and Trevor moans under her and Adrian sets his dry hand on her back, cool fingers tracing along the bony ridge of her spine, palm laving flat and soothing over her lower back, and—

“Yes,” she breathes, leaning back into it again. “Yes, I’m sure.”

He presses deeper, and it’s hard to say just how much time passes like that—Trevor’s mouth under hers, open and welcoming and starving for her; Adrian slowly, carefully working her open. This is the part where Trevor usually gets impatient, starts insisting that he’s _ready_ and would Adrian please _hurry the fuck up_; Sypha feels no need to be so precipitous about it, even as Trevor winds his arms around her, fingers of one hand carding through her hair.

“Relax,” he whispers into her ear, all pretense of whining, whimpering impatience dropped as if it were just a playful act. “Breathe, Sypha. We’ve got you,” he says, and is she not breathing? Is she not relaxed? Is she—

A long, deep breath against Trevor’s chest, in and out, and the tension melts off. He murmurs encouragingly, undecipherable sounds of support and of love.

After an eternity of this, of careful, worshipful attention from both of them, Adrian seems satisfied—and when he slips into her, for a moment it’s like nothing at all. No pain, no discomfort, just taut fullness and a tiny, desperate gasp by her ear and—

And then it’s everything.

“Oh,” she says, breathy and high, as he settles against her back, presses her full against Trevor. A cool hand threads between their bellies, tucks her back against his hips, and she can feel them both breathing against her, their pulses beating together inside her, fast and slow intermingling, and they _came so close—_

“All right?” Trevor asks, still raking his fingers through her hair, still holding out on really _feeling_ this because he’s—because he’s worried about _her_—

—days and weeks of travel and being alone even among the crowding of the Speaker camp, of feeling nothing on her sides at night except _absence_, just absence and emptiness and she never wants to feel that empty again—

—cool lips pressed to the angle of her jaw, to her cheek, gentle and chaste in the wake of the absolutely filthy moan it takes Sypha a moment to even realize is coming from _her_.

“I’m good,” she breathes, barely a whisper, then sucks in a breath between her teeth as they shift minutely against her. “This is good.”

“Is it?” Adrian asks, giving an experimental thrust, and Trevor moans beneath her and god, they can probably _feel each other_. And as one thrust bleeds into a steady rhythm, she finds it’s indescribable—not just the physical sensations, not just the obvious payoff from really good sex, but the closeness and heat and safety and acceptance and _absolution_, and the way the last light of dusk plays over Trevor’s flush, plays through the curtain of Adrian’s hair, and their hands on her gentle as a whisper but still clutching, still keeping her near—all of it.

Adrian's mouth never leaves her skin; open and wet down the back of her neck and over the track of her spine; dragging toothily across the hollow of her throat, tongue following soothingly after; pressing butterfly kisses to her cheekbone, to the arch of her brow and the corner of her mouth. And Trevor…

Trevor is fast falling apart beneath them both. Even as Adrian rolls against her relentless as the tide, Trevor is doing his best to keep the same time, no matter that she'd promised him a more passive role in this. His color is high and he's gasping for breath that isn't quite enough and he's still not well, she can't forget that—but she wants to, wants to forget how badly he'd been hurt, wants to forget the attack and the aftermath, wants to forget everything—

When her orgasm finally takes her, it's like nothing she's ever felt. It's centered deep in her belly like always, but every move her lovers make sends little fizzes of _something_ through her, something that feels like the lightning magic she never had a knack for, and each shock drags the climax out a little longer. It's like she's cushioning a fall with her magic but somehow isn't falling at all, is just suspended there, hanging in the air while wild winds buffet her from every side, and it's like childhood dreams of flying but so much better, so much more real. It shakes out of her and into Trevor and into Adrian until the three of them are shuddering together as one, until she can't tell where her own body ends, where her own pleasure ends, a sharp whining little nip at the crook of her neck and a forehead pressed against hers, fingers in her hair, fingers on her skin, hands winding around her and around each other, and—

And she knows she'll have to come down eventually, that she'll have to fall. But they will, as always, be there to catch her. 

* *

Later, in the moonlight-soft afterglow, she asks into the open air: “Am I still a good person?”

She knows the timing isn’t fair—that after sex they tend to look at her like she hung the moon and all the stars besides. But maybe that’s why she has the courage to ask it now.

A careful silence.

“Would you have hesitated,” Adrian asks, calmly rational and turning to prop himself up on an elbow, “to hurt her or kill her on the battlefield, if it meant saving one of us?”

She shakes her head. “Of course not. But this was not a fight—I was hurting her because I _wanted to_. Because I was angry. She would not stop boasting of what she’d nearly done to Trevor and I just—”

Adrian lays one finger against the side of her face, traces it down gently. Draws her attention back. “Sypha. What information you gleaned may well save any of us, if we can use it to prevent another attack. From an ends justifying the means standpoint, you did nothing wrong.”

“But that isn’t the only way to look at it.”

“No, it isn’t,” Trevor cuts in, rolling toward them, which surprises her a little; in the state he’d been in, she’d thought he was out cold. “Sypha, look. I know what your people have to say about violence, about hurting people. I know why this is upsetting you. Now, me? I don’t give a shit what you did to her. She deserves everything you did and more. But you don’t think like that. You respect life, you try not to hurt people when you can avoid it.”

She does. Usually. “Yes.”

“I don’t know what to say about that, because she sure doesn’t deserve that respect,” he says, stifling a yawn. “We can all try to be good people but we’re also human, and sometimes we do things that aren’t us being as good as we could be, right? But they’re still _understandable_. We’re always living in a moment, and the moment keeps fucking changing. The target keeps moving. We just do what we can with what we’ve got. And it’s not like you do one not-so-great thing and that’s it, you’re an evil bastard forever. That’s fairy tale bullshit.”

Sypha narrows her eyes at him in the dark. For all that his blathering is quintessentially _Trevor_, in that it’s rambley and half-drunk sounding and yet still built around a core of cast-iron truth, there’s something in there that sounds like someone else’s wisdom, like a lesson learned not by experience but by proxy.

“Yes, you’re still a good person,” he says, oblivious to her considerations. He wraps an arm lazily around her shoulders, pulling her in to nuzzle under her ear. “But I’m not saying, here, have a neat little revelation all wrapped up in a bow, now let’s forget it and move on. Question the shit you do that bothers you. That’s what _makes_ you a good person. Just don’t let it eat you up.”

Because an evil person wouldn’t question it, nor would a cruel person or a petty, vindictive person. She’s met enough of them to know the truth of it when she hears it. And he’s right—it’s no absolution, no prettily wrapped box of forgiveness from the universe. But it’s a place to start.

Speaking of. “Did it upset you, what I asked about earlier?” she asks, turning to Adrian. “I didn’t think it was—you seemed upset for a moment.”

A careful silence, then a slow blink, like a cat. “No,” he says, finally, pressing against her other side. “It just surprised me—I didn’t realize you were aware—”

“Our Sypha’s pretty sharp,” Trevor muses, drowsy.

Adrian laughs a little, then. He’s putting on a good act, but Sypha can hear the nerves in it. “The question is, were you sharp enough to understand what we were talking about? You were fairly distracted at the time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Trevor says, waving a lazy hand in the air. “I’m not an idiot, you know, I do pay attention.” And he does, actually; it’s the first thing Sypha noticed about him, after the rudeness and the stink. He’s always listening, always working things out. “And I’ve been around. So you didn’t used to have a cock, I guess? Whatever, you do now. And it's not like it'd matter even if you didn’t. We’d figure something out.”

Adrian’s quiet for a moment; Sypha imagines he either wasn’t expecting Trevor to have worked that out, or wasn’t expecting him to take it in such stride. The silence feels a little fragile.

“Delve into the Belmont trove of penis spells, perhaps?” Adrian finally offers, and she can hear the teasing smile in his voice. “Otherwise we’d have to leave you unfucked, which would be a travesty.”

“Oooh,” Sypha coos, before she can stop herself, because the mental images _that_ conjures... “Do you think there’s anything in there that would let _me_—you know...”

“Oh, wow.” Trevor shakes against her a tiny bit, a full body shudder of, best she can tell, pure unadulterated lust. “That’s hot. Hey, Adrian, that’s hot, right? Back me up here.”

Adrian chuckles against her throat, then shifts to run his tongue over the spot he’d nipped her, the coolness soothing and arousing all at once. “It is.”

“What,” she asks, reaching her arm up to wrap around his head, fingers burrowing into his soft, gorgeous hair. “You want some, too?”

“I think I’d feel left out, otherwise,” he murmurs into her skin, and god, she has to remind herself sometimes just how lucky she is, just how grateful she is for the prophecy that wedged these two into her life, that launched her into the unknown and sent the three of them through hell together and forged them into something stronger than any of them could ever be alone—that gave her so much worth holding onto.

And should anyone dare try to take them away from her? May whatever false deity they pray to save them.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- The big one. I’ve always loved the trans Alucard headcanon but by the time I decided I wanted to include it, I’d already committed to him having certain anatomy. Whoops? So I’m invoking magic, because this world is full of magic and Drac used to be an alchemist and if you can craft a human body into a creature with wings and shit, you can fix up nature’s anatomical fuckups, easy.   
\- I know that canonically to LoI, Mathias was about ten years older than Leon and therefore they couldn’t have grown up together, but I didn’t bother looking that up until I’d already fallen in love with the idea, so fuck it, I'm doing it anyway.  
\- SEASON THREE IS COMING HOLY SHIT AM I RIGHT? SO EXCITED!!!! and I feel this is a good moment to point out that this story (and Wellspring) have been AU from day one (since it was Trevor’s little supernatural-sensing tingle that drew him to the well and then sent them back to the castle, which itself was courtesy of Leon’s AU misadventures), which is to say, I don’t care that season 3 will contradict everything I’ve written; this version is still valid and as I fear no man or god, I don’t fear Netflix either. \o/  
\- Wow this entire set of notes is just me laughing at canon and saying I DO WHAT I WANT. :D FEEL THE POWER OF THE RENEGADE FANFIC AUTHOR.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG. I got thrown off my stride a bit by season 3 (i mean who didn't, right) and this is a long fucking chapter. So long, in fact, that I normally would have split it, but it's really meant to stand together as one thematic chunk, and after it's been so long, you all deserve a nice big chunky thing to sink your teeth into. €:

*

Breakfast the next morning feels like a surreptitious, conspiratorial thing, even if Trevor and Sypha are the only ones there, Adrian having disappeared to the study to get an early start on repairing the windows up there. It's all very ordinary, eggs and bread and bacon, the morning sun-dappled and much colder than it looks through the glass, but there's something about the three of them fucking with family in the house that—

Well, that's just something Trevor's going to have to get over. They're all adults here, and it's not like Leon didn't have kids himself. He's not some innocent church boy.

It still has Trevor feeling thrillingly covert when he sits next to Sypha and, watching her shift a little on the chair, leans into her space. “Sore?” he asks, a teasing near-whisper.

A pleased flush rises in her cheeks, even as she cuts into her egg with the side of her fork. “A bit,” she says, just as quiet.

“Worth it though, isn't it?” Trevor asks, all crooked grin and lifted eyebrows and voice just a little breathy—because try as he might, he can't think about Sypha last night, the way she'd moved and all the noises she'd made and the goddamned look on her face, just fucking _rapturous_, without thinking about every time Adrian's likewise reduced _him_ to that same sort of wrecked, blissed-out incoherency. He's not trying to be self-centered here, really. It's just that the images are there, and they're connected, and even on the mornings his self-control is good, they still make him want to shiver and go hide from the world and maybe pull himself off in a closet somewhere.

And Sypha seems to agree; she lets out something between a happy groan and a laugh, and proceeds to nearly choke on her forkful of egg as a result. A glass of water and a few hearty back thumps later, she levels a glare on Trevor that she barely means. “Are you _trying_ to kill me? Making me laugh while I am eating?”

“Hey, I'm just asking the important questions.”

“I believe that you believe that,” she grumbles.

“So?” he prompts.

“Oh my God, yes,” Sypha finally admits, color still high. “I mean—it's not like we haven't—but this was different.”

“Tends to stick with you for a while, though,” he complains almost convincingly, biting into a crusty piece of bread and reaching for the bacon.

Sypha is silent for a moment, then turns back to her own plate, a wicked smile on her lips. “I think you _like_ that,” she says, like she's discussing the weather. “I think you like that he is not gentle with you.”

Now it's Trevor's turn to almost choke—because fuck, of course she's right, but he didn't think she would just _say it_, you're not supposed to just _say_ things like that—and he scrambles to recover, coughing around the bread and doing his best to get it down—

“_Ow_, fucking _shit_,” Trevor blurts out, the consonants coming out mangled and slurred because, in his rush to clear his mouthful, he’s just chomped down hard enough on his own tongue to draw blood. He covers his mouth with his hand, pained groan coming out muffled against his palm.

“Trevor?” Sypha asks, mischievousness evaporated, now just a little concerned. “Are you—”

“Fine,” he mumbles against his hand, because he _is_; this is just one of those things, like catching a finger on the edge of thick, woody parchment, that hurts a lot more than it should. “Bit my tong—”

Then he freezes, cutting himself off, a faint ripple of curiosity running through him. Because sure, he’s done this plenty of times before, in fights and in training and just while eating too quickly like an idiot, and he’s always thought it was no big deal, but he’s never seen _Sypha_—

“...totally normal, right?” he asks, trying to play it off like a joke.

But Sypha just takes a bite of her bread and narrows her eyes, considering. “Reacting to minor injuries with vulgarity? For you, yes.”

He tries his best to laugh around the throb of pain in his mouth. “No, uh, biting your tongue. Have you ever…?”

Now those narrowed eyes roll, hard. She knows what he’s driving at. “Yes, Trevor,” she says, exasperated but indulgent. “I have bitten my tongue. It’s normal. No, your teeth are not any sharper than they should be—and I did see you peering at them in the mirror earlier. No, this does not mean anything, except that you are a careless eater.”

“Fine, fine,” he says, pressing the injured bit of his tongue against a tooth to gauge how bad the damage is. It stings pretty badly, but there’s no gaping hole there that he can feel. “I just don’t have a good way to figure out what’s normal, you know?”

Sypha’s smile softens; she reaches out to pat his hand, comforting. Because really, he doesn’t—he can’t assume anything he saw in his family was bog-standard human normal, growing up. “I’m sorry,” she says, leaning to nudge his shoulder with hers. “I shouldn’t tease—you have had your world turned upside down, it’s no wonder you’re overthinking things. But you _are_ overthinking things.”

“Maybe.”

“You’re definitely overthinking _this_. But this is not really about your tongue, is it?”

She is, as always, achingly perceptive. The problem is that even Trevor isn’t totally sure what it’s about—he’s just feeling a vague sort of disquiet that keeps prodding its way into his awareness. Thinking about Leon triggers it, but so does thinking about his past life in those ruins out there, running wild with his older siblings and training until he felt ready to drop and the way the whip felt in his hand the first time he picked it up, a clandestine indulgence that left his fingers tingling for hours—and so do the quiet moments in which he has the time to really notice his own body, feel his own heartbeat, the tightness in his muscles, the air going in and out.

He’s always been good at holding his breath; the best he ever timed it was a little over three minutes. Is that normal? He wonders.

So no, it isn’t any one thing; it isn’t any one bizarre little truth or strange observation. He's just started _noticing _things, a crooked backdrop of _shit not making sense._

“Don't worry about it,” he says, leaning to press a kiss to her temple. “I'm fine.”

* *

It’s a little startling, Trevor thinks, to walk into the sitting room and see an extra garment hanging on the hooks by the fire. The white cloak has been given its distance, is a few spaces away from where Trevor’s furred cloak and Adrian’s gold-lined coat and Sypha’s heavy travel robes hang, but it’s still there, a stark flash of light in a room full of dark wood and murky, severe upholstery.

They hadn’t said it in so many words, but they’d at least implied that Leon is welcome to stay here, if for no other reason than that he’s legitimately family—in, unfortunately, more ways than one. He’s been sitting with them for evening meals though he seems to have no use for the food, has been helping with things like bringing in firewood and keeping vigil overnight while they’re sleeping. It has been surprisingly easy to think of him as someone who belongs here, to integrate him into the routine when that’s what he wants and let him wander at his own will without any sense of suspicion or mistrust. Trevor isn’t sure if that makes sense, really. Isn’t sure if it should concern him that he’s accepted another fucking vampire inside his defenses or if it’s just that instinctive recognition the soul has for family, for shared blood and history—that intuitive sense he sometimes gets of whether someone can be trusted, independent of the mind’s reason.

Is trust that comes too easily, too quickly, itself a sign that someone can’t be trusted?

It’s confusing. He’s working on it. But: the cloak.

The linen is threadbare in his fingers—no holes or frayed spots, but neither is going to be long in coming. Trevor runs his thumb over the embroidery at the shoulder, where the blue has become faded by time and the threads are a little rough and pilly. The crest is still completely recognizable, though, no matter how washed out or ragged.

The color is throwing him off, though; burgundy and gold have been the family colors as long as he’s been alive, which is admittedly not very long. But when he thinks about the painting in the hold, the blue and white matches, and it's possible that some things do change over time.

Well. It matched once, when this was in better shape. Maybe Adrian can use his tailoring contacts—whoever it is he got to make that stupid jacket, since they’re clearly willing to work for Belmonts without making an issue of it—to fix it up, or get a new one made. It’s a strange impulse—Trevor wore the same over-repaired tunic for years, even when the gold stitching frayed and he had to start sticking it down with beeswax—but there’s something about seeing their legacy so tattered that makes him want to do something about it.

Or maybe Leon is fine with it as it is; the crest’s not really safe to flash around openly anyway, and it’s not like he feels the cold.

* *

The first time Trevor gets a chance to observe Leon without being observed right back, it’s because after days straight awake and who knows how long before that, the elder Belmont has apparently decided he’s safe enough here to actually sleep. Trevor never really thought of sleep as a thing they _did_, especially the older ones—and while it’s likely that he doesn’t really have to, it’s maybe just a nice respite from being conscious and aware of the state of everything, for at least a few hours at a time. And it’s not like Trevor’s never slept just to escape his own brooding.

And Trevor's not looking for him, specifically—he's just walking down the hall that a lot of the inner bedrooms branch off of, and the door's wide open. It's not a trusting move by any stretch—it's easier to keep an ear out for things going on elsewhere with it open, and it provides an escape route should danger emerge from unexpected directions. Trevor had done the same, his first few weeks sleeping in enemy territory like this. It's an unnerving thing.

There’s a book on the floor, tumbled onto its open pages. A charred smell in the air, from the fireplace burned down low, not tended to. The strained, distant hum of whatever it is that keeps the torches lit, this deep in the heart of the castle.

And there's Leon Belmont, in the fucking flesh.

In some ways it's as creepy as Trevor would have expected, had he given it any thought—a vampire's breathlessness, its utter stillness, doesn't do _any_ unconscious body any favors. But the ramrod straight, corpselike posture he expects, the one he'd caught even Adrian in a few times in those early days when he'd only just come off his year's coffin sleep, is noticeably—and poignantly—absent.

Instead, Leon's curled up on his side, a tense, defensive knot under the blankets, shoulders hunched up around his neck and head tucked in against his chest. It's similar to the pose Trevor remembers being taught as a small child, far too young to fight back, to buy precious seconds in the event of attack by—well, most things, but vampires especially. Hunker down, close off access to the blood supply, wait for help. Survive to adulthood, or at least to the part of childhood that isn’t so damn defenseless, and then any hunter's inborn rage against the supernatural can be given freer, and more productive, rein.

It's an odd posture for someone for whom the worst has already happened. Trevor has to wonder if he's always this defensive in his sleep, and in such a specific way—or if it's because he'd had to delve so deeply into clearly troubling memories, into the truth of how thoroughly trust can fuck a person when it leaves them unable or unwilling to protect themselves.

He wonders if Leon sleeps knowing that the willingness to mount that kind of defense could have saved his soul, had he known then what he knows now.

It doesn't really matter, Trevor supposes. What's done is done. There's little value in what-ifs.

He walks on.

* *

He goes down to the hold later that day, for the quiet, for the chance to really consider these things. Adrian follows him without even asking about it, maybe picking up on his pensive mood.

And they snark at each other and they fuck around like idiots and they make dinner plans: meat pies like Sypha likes so much, all buttery pastry dough and venison from the underground larders, sweet onion and sage and enough black pepper to knock out a horse. Trevor pulls down some of the family histories again, but he’s no longer urgently seeking answers; after a half hour or so it degenerates into reading the most ridiculous bits aloud for Adrian so they can have a rare moment’s levity amid all the looming tension.

When he’s chopping onion in the kitchen later, fighting the watery eyes the stupid things always bring, his hand slips and he nicks his finger—just a tiny thing, just the result of not being able to clearly see what he’s doing. His finger’s halfway to his mouth, kneejerk, before he realizes what he’s about to do and stops, eyeing the little line of red with suspicion.

“Go ahead,” Adrian says, passing behind him with the bowl of dough; bastard doesn’t even need to be told what Trevor’s thinking. “That’s normal. Even animals do it, it helps prevent infection.”

“Am I being ridiculous?” Trevor asks, going right ahead and shoving his fingertip into his mouth as instinct dictates.

“You are.”

“Do you understand _why_?”

A nod, visible from the corner of Trevor’s eye. “I do.” 

Quiet then, as Adrian turns the dough, starts separating it into sheets, layered into the cast iron pan like leaves or the scales of a fish, or a serpent. The silence feels spun from glass.

“Should I be dead?” Trevor’s studying his finger as he shatters that silence; the little cut’s already stopped bleeding. He shakes it out, picks the knife up, goes back to what he’s doing with the onion as if he didn’t just ask Adrian to admit to something devastating and incomprehensible.

And Adrian misses a single beat, but no more; he keeps on layering the dough, with perhaps more carefully controlled precision than before. “_Should_ isn’t the word I’d choose.”

Of course it isn’t. Trevor slices, slices. “Fine. _Would_ I be dead, without this?”

“Probably.”

_That_ was quick. Trevor isn't sure whether to feel insulted. “I don’t just mean this time—”

“I know,” Adrian confirms, moving to set his hands flat on the cooktable rather than picking up another piece of dough. The wood’s coated with flour, and he’s going to have it all over his palms, and his arms are shaking just the tiniest bit. “When you faced my father, as well. Perhaps the fight in the hold. Likely other times.”

Trevor grimaces at the blade in his hand. Not his first fight alone, but a few fights after that, he remembers being thrown against a tree so hard he’d thought he’d been snapped in two. It’s a hell of a thing for a twelve-year-old, being that certain they’re about to die. “So this is the only reason I’m alive.”

“No,” the answer comes quickly, sharply. Preloaded. Convenient. “That’s not the only—you’re _sturdy_, Trevor, not immortal. You can still die very, very easily.” Will die easily, someday, and Trevor can hear the tinge of grief in Adrian’s voice, but it’s quickly buried because that isn’t the point. “That you haven’t is still more a testament to your skill as a hunter than anything else.”

Trevor shakes his head. “Bullshit. Any other equally skilled human—”

“Would have succumbed to their injuries at some point, yes. But perhaps that’s why there _are_ no normal humans that do what your family does.”

A stretch of silence, interrupted only by the repetitive clunk of the knife hitting the cutting block; Trevor hmms, considering. It’s all a little chicken and egg, he supposes; if they hadn’t been able to survive hunting the family would have died out or _stopped hunting_ well before he was born, and so his ability to survive the family trade would be pretty moot.

It's an interesting thought, but it's too soured by crap ideas of destiny and fate for Trevor's tastes.

Adrian looks about to say something else, something else just as maddeningly perceptive and valid, Trevor's sure—then a quiet, patient voice: “He's right, you know.”

Trevor and Adrian both turn, regard the figure in the doorway, with his high-collared tunic and his simple leather armor, protection from all the wrong things; with his pale, pale face twisted in concern.

Trevor takes a centering breath—uses the knife to push all the chopped bits of onion aside, makes himself room to keep working. The venison next, tough dried chunks that need to be sliced finer and then soaked in wine to soften them up. “How long were you…”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose, if that’s what you’re asking,” Leon says, taking a few careful steps into the room. He picks up a sprig of dried sage, twirls it loosely in his fingers; it’s almost like a nervous gesture. Which is weird, honestly. It’s not like Leon has any reason to be nervous or afraid of, basically, _anything._ “It’s just hard not to overhear everything that goes on in this place.”

_Everything that goes on_. Trevor feels heat in his ears, in his face, because that might explain the nerves—but he ignores it. “And?”

“Alucard is right,” Leon repeats, setting the herb back down. “This might have saved your life a handful of times, but if you weren't as good as you needed to be, it never would have mattered.” 

Because—and this is what Adrian had been driving at—he would have made a mistake so fatal not even a diluted vampire’s bloodline could have saved him, and it would have happened fast. He never would have made it to his third or fourth hunt to be thrown against that tree—he'd been twelve fucking years old. He would have died on his very first try.

That's…that's oddly comforting, really. Maybe there's something wrong with his head, that that's comforting, but it is. 

Trevor eyes them both sideways from where he's hovering over the cutting block, lets the knife settle smoothly to the surface. Lets the silence stretch, and for once, it's comfortable.

“Whatever you're making,” Leon says, a clear attempt to change the subject and God, how can someone be four hundred fucking years old and be so painfully transparent? “It smells good.”

Trevor shakes his head; it's not even cooking yet, there's nothing to smell. “That's just the sage, it's—wait.” He looks up sharply. “Do you actually eat food?”

A muffled laugh from Adrian, the utter arsehole, because of course he _knew_.

Leon just shrugs. “I can. I haven't been, because I don't know how secure your supply is, and I certainly don't need it.”

“Great, that's great,” Trevor says, tossing a betrayed look at Adrian, who doesn't even have the decency to meet his eyes. “I feel like a bastard.”

“Don't,” Leon says, before Adrian can chime in his agreement with the notion that Trevor is, indeed, a bastard. “It's a very common mistake.”

“Well, what we're making now? It's pretty good, there's no garlic in it, and there'll be a lot more than we can eat ourselves.” Trevor picks the knife back up, focuses down on where he's slicing the venison, trying to keep this as casual as he can. “_Actually_ have dinner with us, tonight?” he asks, then adds under his breath, barely audible: “Instead of just watching us eat like a fucking creeper.”

For a long moment, just the sound of the knife at work.

Then, sounding like it's coming from around a smile: “I'd be honored.”

* *

The meat pies are, as always, amazing. Little too much onion, Trevor thinks, but he'd gotten distracted chopping it for totally understandable reasons, and no one seems to have any complaints. Sypha is beyond pleased, sings their praises between bites, eats like a goddamned horse.

And it should be strange, watching a vampire eat his cooking, but then, he's gotten used to watching Adrian work a fork around fangs, and nothing in his life is as strange as it should be, anymore.

* *

“How is that healing?”

Trevor doesn’t jump, but it’s a near thing. He’d been so focused on the thick, ugly scabbing under his fingers, the bandages pulled loose so he could examine the wound in the hall mirror, that he hadn’t heard Leon’s approach. Or seen him in reverse, over his own shoulder—and Trevor would be shocked by the clear, perfect reflection the man’s casting if he hadn’t already gone over this ad nauseum with Adrian months ago. 

_What_, Adrian had asked him, all amusement, _are vampires not physical objects that light reflects off of? _Which had led to a lengthy, intensely boring lecture on what exactly light actually is and how it works, which Trevor had tolerated largely because of how much Adrian genuinely lights up whenever he’s given the chance to teach or explain something. It’s worth sitting through an incomprehensible treatise on _anything_ just to see that look on his face.

But regardless—no, Trevor doesn’t jump, because he hasn’t jumped at harmless monsters since he was six. He just cranes his head to regard Leon, completely composed. “Not bad. Considering.” Considering how torn up it’d been, how close Adrian had come to having to sew him up like a ripped tunic. How rough it still is, though there’s still more healing to be done, so hopefully that will improve. “Probably going to have to wear something with a collar from now on, though.”

An indulgent chuckle. “Why do you suppose so many vampires cover their necks?”

Trevor shrugs; it’s not something he’s given much thought to. Usually more interested in other weak spots when he’s fighting, and when vampires are around, he’s usually fighting them. Present company excluded, obviously. “I have no idea. Never understood that, not like you lot need the protection.”

Anymore. Not anymore. Though even _before_, it wouldn’t really have helped; it’s just thin fabric, nothing any hungry monster would find to be an insurmountable obstacle.

“You’re assuming it’s for protection,” Leon says, a small smile playing across his features. 

Trevor shrugs. “Sure. What else would it be?”

Instead of answering, Leon just slips his fingers under the edge of the high collar and draws it down, laying it as flat as it can go—and Trevor can just make out where the skin goes shiny in a messy, ragged scar. It reminds him of the mark he bears himself, on the inside of his elbow; it’s the aged remnant of an amateurish, violent bite, the kind that comes from a vampire who has no fucking idea what they’re doing or simply doesn’t care. And it’s ugly for sure, not the kind of thing anyone would want to flash around, even divorced of its baggage, but...

But it makes sense that _Trevor_ has one reminder like that, will soon have two; he’s human, or mostly so. Humanity means wearing your mistakes on your skin, means your body becomes a map, leylines connecting one trauma to the next and to the next, like stars in a constellation of pain. Immortals are supposed to be immune to that visceral sort of memory. “...why did that scar?”

“It was the greatest betrayal of my life; would you expect it to just fade away?”

Trevor almost rolls his eyes, manages to restrain himself. “Right, that’s very poetic. But it doesn’t actually answer my question.”

A deliberate sigh; Leon pulls the collar back up, shuffles his shoulders. “They always do. The bite that turns you doesn't fade. Before you ask, I don't know why.”

Huh. And yeah—if he thinks back hard, really digs around, Trevor can remember that; can remember how most of the common vampires he'd hunted down for making deadly nuisances of themselves had been wearing _something_—linen or scarves or just rags around their necks, even in the height of summer. Then Dracula’s generals, all those years later, with gold-trimmed perfectly molded armor covering that same stretch of vulnerability.

He also thinks about Adrian and that scar across his chest, livid and unfading even two years later, and he’d gotten it from the one who made him, hadn’t he? From a particular standpoint, anyway. It’s a connection he’s never made, feels like a connection he _should_ have made. “How did I not know that?”

“The purpose of hiding a thing—”

“Is to keep people from knowing about it, yeah, I get it,” Trevor interrupts, because he might have had his formal training cut off when he was twelve but he really doesn’t need to revisit the fucking basics. “But why?”

“I would guess that most feel that it’s a mark of weakness. The last remnant of their humanity, that they’d rather leave behind.”

That doesn’t sound like the man in front of him, at least not from what little he knows. All indications are that Leon had held onto every scrap of his humanity that he’d been able to. “So what about you, then?”

An idle shrug. “It represents a failure, so I’m not _proud_ of it. I don’t like looking at it.” A clawed finger scratches at the fabric, right over the scar, and Leon huffs out something that’s nearly a laugh, wondering and almost a little shocked. “I haven’t actually—it’s been a very long time since I’ve shown that to anyone.”

“And probably not many people even then.”

“No. Just Aurelia—and I think Trefor saw it once. No one else.”

Aurelia—that would be his wife, the mother of their entire clan. Trevor remembers the name from the family tree he'd found, from the story Leon had told him. And of course, his best friend. A very selective group. “Why me, then?”

A moment passes between the question and the decision, clear on Leon’s face, to answer it honestly. “..._that_ scar,” he says first, gesturing at his own eye in indication. “I'm assuming from the age of it that you got it when our home burned.”

And that’s… not really the direction Trevor was expecting this to go in. Certainly not a direction he’s ready for. “Excuse me?”

“You don't have to talk about it yet, if you aren't ready,” Leon says, expression open in a way that almost feels like a trap.

“...I’d really rather not.”

“That’s fine. But if it’s that hard to talk about, then I imagine it’s just as hard to wear it openly. And you don’t have the luxury of being able to hide it.”

“Not easily, no.”

Leon tilts his head, considering. It's almost an exposing gesture, for all that the collar covers everything. “So neither should I. At least this once. But that said…” 

Leon reaches toward him, hesitates for permission, and Trevor consciously stills his instinct to recoil from those claws, to put distance between them. He’s supposed to be working on this, working on trusting him. He’s supposed to be seeing _past_ the bit of himself that’s been trained from birth to see this creature in front of him and _kill it. _

All the cold, strangely soft touch does, in the end, is peel the bandages back a little further; he’s trying to get a better look at the wound. “...you shouldn't hide this one. There’s no shame in it—you were attacked.”

“So were you.”

“Yes, but you survived it. I didn't.”

And that’s just the strangest thought, isn’t it? Trevor has spent his whole life wondering if he could ever hope to live up to this man’s legacy, and yet here’s something he’s done a better job of: bled half dry, his heart’s still beating.

But when the touch retreats and Trevor turns to look, there’s such a look of self-reproach on Leon’s face that Trevor almost feels bad for reveling in it. “I… guess?” he says, reaching up to rewrap the bandages before his ancestor can get a closer look at all the other bites he’s ‘survived’. “Technically? But you're also still standing here talking to me, so I'd say you got through it.”

“It takes no skill to survive like this,” Leon says, and God, he really believes it. “You survived on your tenacity, and that’s something to be proud of.”

* *

It's such a fine line, really, between _You have something to be proud of _and _I'm proud of you._

As mortifying as it is to admit it, even to himself—Trevor will take what he can get, at this point.

* *

It isn’t until much later that day that it really sinks in what a shit hand Leon’s been dealt—sure, Trevor’s heard the story, knows the man hasn’t had it easy, has been through some awful things and has lost and lost and lost, but…

But he spent so long being a figurehead, being a face in a painting, severe and serene and judging him, always judging, always finding him wanting. Because Trevor _is_ wanting, really, and flawed, and prone to fucking everything up when left to his devices. It isn’t an _unfair_ judgment. It had never stung like unfair lies do; it’d been a motivator, if nothing else. Get better, get stronger, never lose a fight, be the _best_—and maybe one day the family ghost will be proud of you.

And here that ghost is, rattling around in the castle with them and just as lost and disoriented as Trevor is about it, hiding the evidence of what was done to him because he thinks that not surviving it or preventing it marks it as shameful. As if he could have done a fucking thing against _Dracula_ with his fucking back broken—as if any of the blame should ever fall on him for something done _to him_—

He’s seen Leon’s gravestone, out in the oldest part of the cemetery. It’s obviously an empty plot, the marker put up for appearances. But what about the others? His children, who should have been just as eternal? Are those empty too, just a whole generation of sham stones? Or are there family bones rotting away beneath that soil too?

Does even Leon know the answer to that?

He’s trying to ease into this connection carefully; he’s never had blood family in his adult life, remembers it only through the vantage point of a child, understands parents and siblings and cousins as a child does. This business of interacting with a distant ancestor as an adult himself, of balancing respect and autonomy, curiosity and tact—it's a fucking mystery, all of it, and he knows he's terrible at all of those things. So he’s trying to curb his more reckless impulses and take it _slowly_, but...

But it’s painful, this process of coming to really know someone—beyond the recitation of stories, beyond the carefully posed images and repeating motifs and legends. It hurts to sound the depths of someone else’s pain. And like standing at the edge of a frozen stream, knowing he _must _end up in that water one way or another, it’s tempting to just dive into it—let those icy daggers hit home and do their damage and then be done with them.

He knows from experience, though: there’s no simply being _done_ with pain when it goes this deep, casts this long of a shadow. That isn't how it works.

* *

He’s paging through one of the older books in the hold later that night, an early account of the family in Wallachia, when a folded piece of parchment falls out. There’s a drawing between its creases, rough in that way of a talented artist being forced to work extremely quickly, and there are seven figures in the frame—soldiers or knights, sitting casually around a fire pit, the aftermath of some battle or another.

And of course Leon’s there; Trevor’s familiar enough now with the set of his features to pick him out through the roughness of the lines. He’s sitting on a fallen log, just one reveler of many, hunched low to keep at eye level with his comrades, arm wrapped in dark bandages. A bit further down the log, so close to Leon that they’re probably brushing shoulders, is a dark haired figure that should be nondescript enough to just fade into the background, but somehow Trevor knows, from the eyes or the expression or just something tied to all the weirdness in their shared bloodline: this is the man who would be Dracula. 

It’s just one moment, years before all the misery and the violence and the pain, frozen—immortalized by some talented knight in their company who’d had no idea what he’d been capturing. They’re both laughing at _something_; the details are likely lost to time, but they’re _laughing together._

It hits Trevor like a mace to the temple, leaves his ears ringing: they really had both been happy, once.

* *

Trevor isn't sure what drives him to take in the air on such a bitterly cold night; his fingers feel frozen and distant as he works the blade over a piece of branch he's found, moonlight and glow from the castle behind him providing paltry illumination but this is something better done by touch than by sight anyway. It's a still, quiet evening, for all that his thoughts are restless. There's a lot to consider, all of a sudden, and the tension of it all feels like a spring coiled tight inside him—in his head, in his gut, in his fingers, and it's making him even sloppier with the carving than usual. 

“Fuck,” he swears, running his fingers over the basic shape, feeling for symmetry and not finding it. He really is shit at this. 

He's also preoccupied. And if it weren't for all the years of training, and then all the years after that of living or dying by the lessons that training taught him, he might not have picked up on the approaching presence until far too late.

As it is, he gives the branch one last slice and then casually lifts the knife in the direction of the forest, a laziness in the gesture that belies how quickly he can replace it with his sword or his whip, if he needs to. “Not in the mood for sneaky games,” he says, a little taunting, knife tip tracking the presence unerringly even if he can't see them. The words won't mean anything if it's a dumb monster, but...

“No sneaky games,” comes a soft, familiar voice, a pale-cloaked figure emerging from the rest of the darkness like it just now materialized there. Trick of the light, no doubt. “It's just me.”

Trevor squints, trying to focus in the dim conditions. The white of the cloth is almost glowing in the light of the fat full moon, but there's a damp duskiness around the edges that looks fresh, and there's a lingering wildness in Leon's expression that is fading by the moment. “Out hunting?”

A fractional nod; Leon lifts a hand, demonstrating the hare he's brought home. “To make up for wasting some of your food.” 

That isn't even remotely necessary, and they've already told him as much. Either he's truly, deeply concerned about not abusing their hospitality, or he's out because he _wanted_ to be out. Wanted to be out in the woods at night, chasing rabbits. Which is _fine, _okay, everyone's got their hobbies, except—

Trevor takes a deep breath, scenting the air. Metallic, faintly like death.

“That’s a pretty dry rabbit,” he observes, making an attempt to be diplomatic.

A questioning look in response. “I'm not sure how you can tell that just looking at it.”

Fine. Forget being subtle. “I can't. You just stink of blood, is all,” Trevor clarifies, as the knife works over the wood, chipping and chipping away. 

And he expects Leon to take offense, but he just laughs a little, low and quiet. “And you _still_ have onion breath from yesterday's dinner.”

He'd_ told _Adrian they'd used too much onion. Trevor licks his teeth, self conscious. “I guess that's…kind of the same thing.”

“It really is.”

Hmph. Trevor wants to scoff at that, insist that it isn't, because after all, he didn't run the onions down in the woods and—heh, onions with legs. Not much better than the demonic cabbage, and that, he probably _would_ hunt down. For the good of the people. But normal onions? It'd been a much less bloody sort of massacre when they'd pulled the last of Sypha’s garden up, compared to whatever just went on in the forest. But he did kill the deer that went into the pies, and if he's being honest he knows that it's really not that different. Food’s food, in the end.

Leon just stands there while Trevor's mulling it over, considering him as he considers Leon right back. Then he sets the hare down on the step and sets himself down alongside Trevor, the breaking of that intense eye contact doing a lot to make the silence more companionable. 

Trevor doesn't move away, even if his gut wants him to, is twisting over itself at the proximity. He drags the knife up the length of the knobby piece of wood, doing his best to shear away the remainder of the bark.

“Making a stake?” Leon asks, trying to play it off as lighthearted. “Should I be worried?”

And Trevor just laughs a little, working the blade around a knot in the wood—because Leon wouldn't have any reason to worry even if they did want to kill him. It's becoming more and more obvious that his ancestor is in a different class from all the common vampires he's killed over the years, and he isn't sure how to feel about that. “It's not. It's supposed to be…” He trails off, turning it around in what little moonlight is available. It's really just sort of a lumpy mess. “Well, it isn't much of anything yet.” 

“You're... whittling.”

Trevor groans good-naturedly “God, don't call it that, it makes me sound like an old man.”

The extremely old man sitting next to him—no matter that he's wearing a young man's face—huffs, pretending at insult. “Anything but that.”

Trevor grins down at his carving, keeps going. “Just some old fart who never left his village, sitting around reminiscing about the bloody turnip harvest of 1422.”

“Was that a good year for turnips?”

“I don't fucking know. I don't know if you're aware, but I didn't come from a family of farmers,” Trevor grumbles, and it's supposed to be light, be a joke, ha ha, but then there's a surge of bitterness that he can't quite swallow back.

“...you're still struggling with this,” Leon says, and it isn't a question.

Should he not be? Christ, should he just have gotten over it in a day? Trevor grimaces, pushes a little too hard, chips off a bit he didn't mean to. Swears under his breath. Doesn't have a good answer, so asks a question instead: “Why did you go hunting, really? There's plenty of blood in the cans downstairs.” 

A slight wince, just out of the corner of Trevor's eye. “There is. And it's fine in a pinch, but—”

Ah. Too human, too full of pain and fear. “It's not to your taste.”

“No.”

Trevor blows a breath between his teeth. “Yeah, Alucard doesn't like it much either.” 

No response, and he lets that silence stretch a little longer, knife working in his fingers. 

“Look,” he finally says, and he isn't even sure why he's trying to answer the ridiculous fucking question. _Still struggling, _fuck. “I'd gotten used to being who I was. I'd gotten used to being a drunk excommunicated piece of shit who is _also _a pretty damn good hunter. I had a _handle _on that, you know?”

Leon's expression cracks, then; there's something there that looks unaccountably like pride, but that can't be right. “You _are_ a very good hunter. I saw how many of them you killed before I had to step in. And I suppose the church gets to decide if you're excommunicated or not, but the rest I'm not sure about.”

“I _thought_ I was a good hunter,” Trevor insists, ignoring the rest because he isn't exactly in the mood for a pep talk. “Maybe I'm just a big cheater.”

It's deadly quiet, out here. There's not even a breeze stirring, which bodes well for the slightly warmer weather holding for at least another day. Had Trevor really heard Leon coming, or had he _sensed _him? That's something he’d always been told they could do, his family, but how? 

“Do you have any more pieces of that wood?” Leon asks, a bizarre non-sequitur. 

“What, you want to give it a go?” Trevor shrugs, because sure, fine. They're supposed to be bonding? This seems like as good a bonding activity as any other. He stands, wanders a bit over to the edge of the staircase where a lot of broken foliage has gathered in the winter winds—picks up another bit of branch, tosses it across. “All my knives are blessed though, so I don't have any kind of tool to give you.”

Leon just holds up a hand, talons flashing in the moonlight. “I have my own.”

And sure enough, with a few deft movements bits of wood fall away and the thing starts to take shape—what shape exactly, Trevor isn't sure. But it's still compelling to watch, the precision and control going into each slice impressive in its own right. Impressive and _unnerving_; he's been on the wrong end of those kind of claws before, usually a sloppy desperation move at the tail end of a fight; to see them brought to bear with such deliberate accuracy—

“Why don't you cut those down?” Trevor asks, idle, sitting back down and returning to his own carving as a distraction. He supposes there's_ something_ like a head visible, a torso—roughly. Very roughly. God, he's really not getting any better at this. “Actually, can you even? I've never seen one of you without them.”

“I've tried.” Silence for a moment, scrffing of said talons against the wood. “They grow back within a day, so it's a lot of work to keep them short, and—honestly, I've just gotten used to them, at this point. They _can_ be useful.”

Sure they can be, Trevor has no doubt—useful for killing rabbits maybe, or for leaving cryptic messages in trees or carving or, you know, slitting someone’s throat when their guard’s down. Not that he has any reason to think—

Trevor doesn't voice any of this; he just focuses on the blade.

“You're not _cheating_,” Leon says eventually, pausing to examine his work. “It's just another tool, and not even the most important one. So you're a little faster, a little stronger, a little sturdier? It's not that far outside what's normal for humans. You should have met my grandchildren—they looked _almost_ human, they really did. Very close to being able to live in that world.” His voice has gone soft, the fondness and longing unmistakable. “But little Annalee could have lifted a Minotaur all on her own.”

“Must've made her popular with the boys.”

A strange smile, then—softly reminiscent. “Ah, well, they weren't who she wanted to be popular with.”

Oh. 

Well, maybe that sort of thing does run in families after all. Explains, maybe, Leon’s non-reaction when Trevor had owned up to his own relations. “That didn’t bother you?” he asks anyway, careful and even and very much aware of the eggshells he’s treading on.

A short little huff of laughter in response, but it sounds pained. “It bothered me that she thought I’d be upset,” he says, mild, but his hands have stilled on the carving, gone a little tight there. “I thought I’d done a better job than that.”

“Regrets are a bitch,” Trevor sighs, because wow, Sypha’s right, he is not good at this, but at least he's _trying._

A dry laugh, barely there.

“I have to admit,” Trevor forges on, in spite of his own awkwardness, “that surprises me? I always figured—”

“That I was the stodgy, judgmental asshole the stories made me out to be?”

Trevor blinks, can't help from laughing himself, now. “Where the hell did you learn to talk like that?”

A conspiratorial smile, barely visible in the dark. “I've been watching the three of you off and on for a year, now. Where do you think I learned it?”

“Yeah, that's not creepy.”

“The way history remembers us can get out of our control,” Leon says, ignoring the sarcasm, returning to the real question. “Especially when we don't have a hand in it. It'll happen to you, too—in a few generations no one will know that you named your dog Shitbutt or once drank an entire bottle of Dracula's stolen whiskey. Or that you were in love with his son.”

Trevor swallows tightly. He realizes that—he does, but... “Alucard will know.”

“But what will he choose to pass on?” Leon asks, and there's such a profound sadness to it, such a bitter well of hurt that he's drawing from with every word. What will Adrian choose to pass on about Trevor, about what they were to each other? What did this Mathias, even after he’d shed the name, choose to pass on about _him?_

Nothing, as far as Trevor's aware. Even Adrian seems blissfully ignorant of what's obvious, here—but then, he hasn't read all the old family books Trevor has. 

For a long moment, just the rough noises of wood being chipped away, revealing the shape hidden inside.

“It isn't just that you were being really fucking tolerant, is it?” Trevor asks, quiet. Quieter than he ever is, really. “It's that getting upset about her, or about me—it'd be hypocritical, wouldn't it.”

To his credit, Leon doesn't even visibly react—doesn't stop what he's doing, doesn't accidentally cut too deeply or take off a corner of what he's working on. He just makes a noise halfway between a growl and an affirmation, then takes a breath he doesn't need.

Overhead, clouds drift across the moon, cutting off its light.

“I was damned long before any of this happened,” he finally says, just as quiet. “We both were.”

And there's a lot of really deep, sincere things Trevor could say about that—about how there are people in the world that do genuinely horrible shit, who actually deserve to be damned. Like hey, the fucking Bishop of Târgoviște, who murdered countless innocents in the name of his faith and started a war that nearly destroyed humankind—that guy? He's going to hell. Or already has, hopefully. That what they're talking about is such an innocent offense, by comparison. 

But Trevor's excommunicated, after all, already has ‘ship directly to hell’ stamped on his arse in big, bold letters—so he doesn't really have room to talk.

Instead, he shrugs, twisting the knife in his grip to attempt some detail work in the figure’s face. Smiling, she's always smiling. “So I guess I wasn't reading too much into those journal entries after all.”

_Now _Leon stills, claws poised against the wood. “You were reading my journals?” he asks, sounding vaguely scandalized.

Trevor grins down at his work. That's better than self-loathingly sullen, at least. He's good at this. “Hey, you left them in a _library_ _full of books_, how was I supposed to know what's off limits?”

“I…” Leon starts, then trails off. “You're right, of course. I just—”

“No one else has seen them,” Trevor adds quickly, not looking up. “For whatever that's worth.”

It seems to be worth enough. Another small eternity drifts by. The night is getting jarringly cold; Trevor's fingers are going numb, but it's okay, he's just about finished. Sypha won't be _flattered_ by the likeness, but this is all a work in progress anyway. 

“All right,” Trevor says, sheathing his knife. “I'm calling it, it's getting too cold out here. Let's see what you've got.”

And Leon—one of the greatest hunters who's ever lived, probably one of the more powerful creatures in the world—looks suddenly sheepish, turning the block of wood in his hands. It's… it's interesting, at least. Maybe an attempt at something abstract? Or…

“It was supposed to be a wolf,” he says, though, so no. Not abstract. Just really, really crap. “But…”

“Wow,” Trevor says, trying hard not to laugh. “I thought _I_ was bad at this.”

Leon doesn't seem to have any similar compunctions; he laughs openly, holding the monstrosity up in the moonlight. “At least you can say this,” he says, eyeing Trevor. “You came by your lack of artistic skill _honestly_.”

“Apparently,” Trevor laughs, and suddenly realizes that he's got his hand set on the other man's shoulder, just a companionable sort of thing, and—and the world hasn't imploded, reality hasn't crashed in on itself. Life continues.

Life always continues, no matter what it looks like or who’s a part of it, no matter who's along for the ride at the moment. Generations down the line, Trevor is still just…what? Some sort of family, sure, but he'd always _felt_ the distance between them before, felt the fact that so much had happened and changed within the family in the time that's passed that in some ways, they're basically strangers. How many _greats_ can you tag on to _grandson_ before the relation loses meaning?

But right now, it's…

Trevor doesn't remember a lot about his father as a person—he'd liked to cook, hated close quarters fighting, was unerringly practical in the field, loved all his children dearly—and even less about his grandfather. But he wonders if a moment like this could have ever been in the cards, if they'd lived. 

“Can I ask you something?” Trevor isn't sure where he's going with this, even as he sets the little figure he's made off to the side. “Probably not a fun question.”

“Of course,” Leon says, idly, like he has no idea what's coming—but it sounds a little forced. 

Trevor takes a breath, lets it out. Leans back onto his arms. “Are any of your kids still alive?”

Leon looks down from where he'd been gazing up into the sky, and for a moment he’s more readable than he usually is, even in the dim light; there’s nothing there but a deep, terrible sadness. He looks off into middle distance, for a second or more, then shifts that gaze to Trevor, though it’s still unfocused. “I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know. That’s… not entirely what Trevor had been expecting. “Weren’t they supposed to be immortal?”

“You know that isn’t how it works.”

Trevor takes a breath, puffs it out hard. Yeah. If immortality were absolute, then he wouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about Adrian getting himself killed like an idiot. Agelessness does not equal immunity from violence, or from dumb decisions.

“I’m assuming,” Leon says, and his voice sounds like bright, brittle crystal, a breath away from shattering, “that they’re gone, because I’ve seen no sign of them in the last year, and I’ve _looked_. But I don’t know. The world is large.”

_Can’t you sense them? _Trevor wants to ask, because he’d always assumed that was the case. He would ask, if this were just another opportunity to clarify a point of lore, some detail that the bestiary had never been clear on—but it isn’t.

It’s just a grieving father, so determined to be a useful ally, to be accepted by them, that he’s not even acknowledging that grief aloud. Sitting here a stone’s throw from the ruins of his legacy, on the front steps of his greatest enemy’s home, and no matter that he’s a denizen of the night himself, his skin has got to be crawling to be here. But he's keeping that in, bearing with it, pretending at a stoicism that belies all the emotion Trevor can see there, roiling just beneath the surface. Trying to live up to a myth.

And perhaps the way history sees them can get out of their hands, but maybe they can also play right _into _its hands, sometimes. 

“You don't have to—” Trevor starts, though he isn't even sure what he's about to say next.

Which is probably just as well, because that's about the moment he notices a bright pinprick of light out there in the field, brighter than the moonlight and the starlight combined, drawing quickly closer.

“Hold on,” Trevor says, interrupting only himself; he stands up and squints toward the light. Coming in quick, and bouncing in a regular pattern—a lantern held on horseback?

Yeah. That's exactly what it is. And as the rider gets closer enough to pick out details, Trevor can see how frantically he's riding, how exhausted the horse is, how barely he's hanging onto its reins.

“We're being attacked!” the horseman shouts, breathless, as soon as he's close enough. Trevor feels Leon stand up alongside him, a quiet rush of air. “They're setting fires in the town—too many monsters for us to handle!”

“_Shit_.” Trevor had been teaching them a little, before winter started limiting their trips to town—basic defense, how to use their weapons properly, salt and holy water—the basics, the same shit he'd taught the people of Greşit. They'd been quick and eager learners, and this is the first time they've been attacked in enough force for those lessons to be insufficient. “We'll be there as soon as we can! Go find other help!” Trevor shouts, waving the man on.

He nods and rides on, and the poor horse is going to drop soon but if he can get to even one more of the outlying homesteads before that happens—

“Okay,” he says, turning to Leon. “Go find the stables and—wait, no. Can you tell exactly where Sypha and Alucard are?”

Leon tilts his head, narrows his eyes, as if he's listening to something very distant or very faint. “Sort of. I can narrow it as I get closer to them.”

“Great, because I have no idea. Get them, bring them to the stables. I'll get the horses ready.”

It only occurs glancingly to Trevor that maybe he shouldn't be acting like he's in charge, here—but Leon just nods, vanishes through the barely cracked open doors of the castle like a wisp of smoke disappearing into itself. Which, okay. A little eerie, but whatever. They've got more important things to worry about.

Trevor makes for the stables in a flat out run, frigid air stinging in his lungs—damning whatever idiotic part of him had thought they could ever just have a single quiet night.

*

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW look at all that CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT you'd almost think Leon's kind of a real person who has legit things to be upset about and whose past and traumas have actually affected him and who never forgets for even a second what he actually is, huh?
> 
> Annalee's gotten exactly one line in this entire story so far but I LOVE HER SM OK
> 
> And Trevor? Don't call out people smelling like what they just ate when you apparently can't clear your own onion breath in an entire damn day. GET SOME PEPPERMINT TO CHEW ON IT WORKS WONDERS.


	14. Chapter 14

*

“What if it's more of a prop?”

It comes out before the thought is fully formed, and that's something Adrian usually regrets—but this is a situation that encourages musing aloud. They've been holed up in the castle library for hours, boots off and squeezed into one of the huge, soft chairs and nudging one another’s feet back and forth like affectionate children, picking through apocrypha and legitimate resources alike—chasing something that they do not know the name of, and only barely have a sense of its nature.

It would, of course, have been too much to expect of the universe to grant someone an ability and also explain how it works. Or to expect even the most learned of Sypha’s people to know absolutely everything there is to know. Nothing worth understanding comes easily; something both his parents taught him in each their own ways, though he'd never had any part of his legacy kept from him intentionally, as seems to have happened with Sypha.

Sypha—who seems unbothered by the deception, who chews on her lip as she pages through the heavy tome spread out in front of them. Artfully distracted. It's a good look on her, but it can't last. “A prop?” she repeats, looking up, face scrunched up in distaste. “Like some roadside illusionist? Our magic doesn't _use_ props—intent is in the mind.”

“And yet,” he says, reaching to the stack of books on the table to their side, finger tracing down across the spines. “You still use your hands to conjure, use specific gestures even, when we both know that isn't necessary.”

“Those are just sigils, they're for _focus_—” she starts dismissively, then cuts herself off, eyes narrowing in curiosity. “What are you looking for?”

“There was a volume on practical divination, I thought—ah, here we go.” Adrian slips the book free of the stack, spreads it open across their knees. “And...hm. ‘Prop’ may not be the correct word—but we've been assuming the stone is some kind of magical device, that there's something _in_ it that supplied your father and grandmother these abilities you're describing.”

“Because they're apparently impossible otherwise.”

“Within the framework of Speaker magic, yes, but…” Adrian trails off, flipping pages. The book is honestly mostly nonsense, is the thing—tea leaves and onions and bone throwing—which is why Sypha had discarded it. But he's just made a connection with something else he's read, and— “Let’s see, here. Dreams. Entrails. Bird behavior, sheep behavior. Clouds. There's got to be _something_…”

Ah, here we are. He leans back to give her a clearer view, shows her the entry on amulets and charms. The few illustrations look nothing like her stone, but they also look nothing like each other; there's no consistent form to them. “You called the sigils a _focus_, and maybe that’s what this is as well. These objects aren’t usually innately magical, but there’s a pattern or a resonance that allows for focusing abilities you already possess.”

“That I already—that can't be right,” she mutters, distracted as she scans down the page. Adrian watches as her hand settles over the stone where it sits on the arm of the chair, lightly, fingers just brushing its endless night sky surface as she rolls it rattlingly across the wood. “I was told that only black magicians...”

“But what even _is_ black magic, really?” 

“It’s…” she purses her lips in thought, taking the question in full seriousness. “It is many things, isn’t it? Demonic magic, but also the blood magic vampires use, and necromancy, and… other things. I’ve never seen a consistent definition, but Speakers don’t _use_ any of those forms of magic, so…”

“I’ve always been told that it’s a catch-all,” Adrian muses, turning a page, considering the illustrations. “For any magic that makes humans uncomfortable. The elder you spoke to said that divination falls under that?”

“Yes, or she implied as much, anyway.”

“Mn.” He raises an eyebrow. “Wards are considered a kind of black magic too, I thought.” Hence why they’re all over the Belmont property; not all of the church’s accusations had been inaccurate, only overblown in their significance—

“Wait,” Sypha interrupts his thoughts, flat and a little shocked. “What? No, wards are just...” she trails off, and he can see the gears turning. 

“They’re a way to exert control over reality, aren’t they?” he posits, tentative, because this is her area of expertise, not his. “At least as you’ve explained it. As was the castle capture spell, I thought.”

“I…” she starts, then looks down toward the book in her lap, eyes hooded. Her focus isn’t on the page. When she continues, it’s quiet, almost to herself. “It was just a half-finished spell that I found, it seemed reasonable that I could cast it. I suppose it makes sense that..”

She trails off. Adrian narrows his eyes, considering. This may not go over well, but it's the most obvious possibility. “How well did you know your father, your grandmother?” he asks, careful. 

“I was a child. How well should I have known them?”

He hesitates, and then, quietly: “Well enough to be sure they _weren't_ black magicians?”

There’s a pause, as the question lands and processes. Then a sharp laugh, defensive, just a spasm that he feels against his ribcage. “Are you suggesting that my family was keeping a hydra-like secret as well? Haven't we had enough of that with Trevor?”

Adrian leans back in the chair, crosses one ankle over the other, idly traces a toe along the side of Sypha’s foot. It’s always very quiet in the library, no matter how noisy his thoughts become, how reckless his worry. “I know only that when it rains, it pours,” he says, feeling the resignation in his own voice. “And that it was my unfortunate family relations that began this saga.”

“Oh, I hope not,” she says, putting on a good show of lightness, of not being bothered by the possibility—but there’s a fragility to her voice. “This castle is already full to bursting with family drama. I do not think it can take much more without _exploding_.”

It is. Trevor is, at least, coming around to the realities he’s been forced to face recently; Adrian expects there to be a backslide at any moment, a crisis of humanity blown far out of proportion and hiding the same heartbreaking self-loathing as ever at its core, but so far it hasn’t come. Add to that his own amateurish uncertainty trying to hold court in his father’s fading shadow, his tenuous control over himself during the blood-haze of the solstice, and the fact that Sypha has seemingly had secrets kept from her all her life—and it has become unwieldy, to say the least.

Time ticks by, for a moment. There's a clock somewhere in the library, he can hear its gears ratcheting and the quiet _tch tch_ of seconds passing, though he had never once succeeded in finding it. 

Sypha shifts against him, uneasy. “Do you think—”

Then she cuts off, because the door to the library has just swung open with a rushing of air, and footsteps track straight toward them, hurried, and Adrian can hear no heartbeat, which means that Trevor isn’t there and _something is wrong_—

They’re both on their feet, pulling boots back on—Adrian reaching for his sword to strap on opposite the short blade he never really takes off—by the time the elder Belmont rounds the stacks and comes into view. He cannot possibly be out of breath, but there’s an urgency about him that gives the impression he ran all the way here.

“Where’s Trevor?” Adrian finds himself asking, before he can catch it back; he still does not trust easily and a theatrical rescue and a shared meal are not enough to completely overcome that, just yet. _What if this has all been a hoax after all, what if this is a trap, what if Trevor is—_

“Gone to the stables.” Leon looks between them, mouth drawing into a thin line at the faint undercurrent of distrust and panic in Adrian’s voice. Doesn’t remark on it. “The town’s under attack, he asked me to bring the two of you.”

Sypha glances at Adrian, hand slipping the blue stone into a hidden pocket in her robe. He can tell that she wants to ask why Trevor did not come here instead, but Adrian knows the answer to the question: because Trevor is not a predator, cannot home in on heartbeats through seventeen layers of stone wall. She still narrows her eyes, skeptical. “Why didn’t he—”

Then Leon does something strange, even by Adrian’s standards; his lip pulls back in a hiss of pure frustration, a gesture Adrian’s never seen even in years of attending his father’s court. There’s an uncivilized honesty to it. “We don’t have _time_ for this,” he punctuates. “If we don’t join him quickly, he will go _alone_.”

And damn it, but he’s right. Trevor will absolutely ride into danger on his own, never mind that he once claimed to hate these people—they’re his duty to protect, now, and protect them he will, with or without support.

And they don’t have any real _reason_ to distrust Leon, do they? Aside from the strategic value in simply distrusting _everyone_.

So they go.

* *

There’s only the three horses, is the thing—the two that came in with the wagon, all those months ago, and another Adrian picked up for himself when a reputable trader came through Acasa in November. It’s treacherous enough with the snow that the mounts will have trouble with even single riders; doubling up on any of them would weigh them down too much for the conditions, and anyway, Leon claims, he can make better time on his own. He’ll meet them there.

“Lose the cloak,” Trevor mutters, swinging up into his saddle; he’s got his old tunic on under his own cloak, the beaten and threadbare one with the crest, but these people already know _he’s_ a Belmont. No point giving away that he isn’t actually the only one.

Leon doesn’t argue, just tosses the garment over one of the stable beams and disappears through the door, and as Trevor watches his retreating form for a moment, he could swear that that form changes shape—a ways out, right at the limits of his vision, where he has to squint to see anything in the dark and even straight lines blur fuzzily where they meet at the horizon—between one step and the next, easy as a breath, hunkered lower, moving faster, then gone.

It could have been a trick of the dim light. Trevor knows that it wasn’t.

* *

The light, it turns out, is always trying to pull tricks. Memory isn’t much better about it.

They get to the town quickly enough. Uneventfully, even. Follow the screams, follow the orange-white light. It’s easy.

But.

* *

_run run run run oh god oh god run_

_“Are they all still in there?”_

_sweat running into his mouth lungs burning every gulp of cold air hurts hurts hurts_

_“Good fucking riddance, goddamned monsters.”_

_heat rising up from the snow melting it into more sweat more tears like the windows are weeping_

_“What the hell—no, no, give him to me, the little shit—”_

_fighting and thrashing and a flash of silver and pain and blind oh god blind and blood running down his face into his mouth and dropping onto the snowy ground like burnt black coals and the taste of it burns in his brain and only makes him fight harder because if he stops_

_if he stops_

_if he_

_he stops_

* *

He freezes.

It’s a terrible thing for a fighter or hunter to do in any situation, much less one this treacherous, with enemies about and chaos erupting from every quarter. It is _unthinkable _for a Belmont on the trail of monsters, going about the work he’s been trained for since he could walk, work that is supposed to be as second-nature as breathing. 

Still: he freezes, as the fire rises up before them, chewing its relentless, merciless way up the walls of the town’s church, and he wouldn’t even _care_ except that he remembers: they’re sheltering townsfolk, in there. Actual innocents. Like his brother and all his sisters, and the cook and the groundskeeper and the stablehand and they’re _burning alive in there, aren’t they?_

They’re burning and he cannot breathe.

It’s the heat, he tries to rationalize, slamming into him in a hard wave, boiling the breath from his lungs and singeing all his nerve endings where they hang exposed and fraying in the night air. Or it’s the way the wall of flame dances up the stone facade, ducking in and out of narrow windows to catch the wood framing within, running along the lines of moss grown between the stones like a child’s drawing of a brick wall, all limned in heat and brilliance. Or it’s the smell. Or it’s the screams, or it’s all of them put together, and somewhere in the back of his mind, Sypha’s voice: _you still flinch from fire when you aren’t expecting it._

He _had _been expecting this. He’d _known_ there’d been fires set in the town. He’d been expecting burning market carts, maybe, or haystacks set ablaze where they lean against wood-framed houses; a strategy of maximum carnage and chaos. 

He hadn’t expected the smell of superheated stone and mortar like the sulfur stink of the abyss, hadn’t expected to see the church engulfed in flame the same way his home had been, hadn’t expected to realize _there are still people in there—_

“_Trevor,” _Sypha says at his shoulder, quiet but insistent. “Are you—”

“He’s not,” Adrian cuts her off, and a pair of hands settle on his shoulders, cool and possessive, protective. “Trevor. Sypha and I will handle the fire, we’ll get everyone out, all right?”

No. No, that’s not all right. He promised to protect these people, this is his responsibility and he won’t freeze up like this, not _again_, not like before, he’s _better than this _and God but he can still _smell it_ or maybe that’s now, maybe that’s the smell of townspeople burning _now_, his townspeople, burning because he’s just _standing here—_

“You _will _be protecting them,” Sypha says, an icy sharp determination in her eyes, and he isn’t sure if he’s said all of that out loud or if she really is reading his mind. “There are night creatures loose. You need to take care of _that_ while we take care of _this_.”

Because he’s a hunter. That’s what he does—he hunts fucking monsters. What is he even thinking, trying to be some kind of fire-diving hero? Ridiculous, ha ha. Ha. He nods a few times, loose and wooden, draws the Morning Star from his belt without even processing that he’s doing it. 

Off to the side, he can see Leon shift, hand settling on the hilt of his sword. There’s obvious concern in his voice that doesn’t make it into the words. “I’ll help you with the fight. I won’t be much use here.”

Right, Trevor reminds himself, grounding himself in the mundanity of logistics. Because it’s a church that’s burning, and vampires have this habit of _catching on fire _when they set foot on holy ground. 

“Agreed,” Adrian says, a smirk in his voice. It’s obvious he’s picked up on the same line of thought, and his hands give another squeeze before letting go, drifting away. “I don’t think _more fire_ is going to help their situation.”

“Thanks, smartass,” Trevor grits out. 

“Always.”

“Be careful, Trevor Belmont,” Sypha says, almost ritualistically, leaning in to press her mouth to his cheek—there’s a cool, lingering touch of fingertips on the nape of his neck, a counterpoint to her fiery heat—then one last look, and Adrian and Sypha are gone.

Take a breath. Focus. _You have a job to do._

“Okay,” Trevor says, turning to Leon, fighting to gather his composure. He despises the fragility in his own voice, is grateful only that there’s not enough time right now for any of them to force him to talk about it. “...okay. I don’t know if you’ve fought these things before, but just—be ready for surprises.”

The elder Belmont simply draws his sword in response, a smooth hissing ripple of metal through the air, and nods. There’s a sharpness in the movement, an agitated grace that belies the calm of his expression—almost an eagerness, something that rings with the rush of the fight before the fight’s even begun, and Trevor recognizes it because he _knows that feeling._

And he’s suddenly unsure why he was ever worried; it is, truly, the monsters who have something to worry about this night.

* *

Sypha cannot douse the flames, not safely—it would take more ice than she’s ever conjured at once, could well drown the building’s occupants even as it saves them from the fire. And the building is already a loss; even the pastor and his underlings seem unconcerned with the preservation of their House of God, so long as the people are gotten out safely. So: into the flames it is, for brave heroes looking to increase their tally of lives saved.

As soon as they cross the threshold, Adrian’s senses are overwhelmed. 

Any screams for help he’d thought they could follow are being consumed in the noise of wood splintering and cracking under its own weight, groaning and twisting and giving way as the fire licks it to blacked cinders. The heat is consuming, worse higher up around his ears, and the smoke is thick and coarse, wood ash scratching his throat as they try to navigate through its blackness. It’s not how Adrian expects the inside of a burning building to be—he can’t even see flames, though that is not surprising as he can see almost nothing. This isn’t mere darkness, which his eyes would cut through easily; the smoke is just too _dense_.

“Sypha,” he tries, coughing hard against the fabric of his shirt, fisted up against his mouth. His other hand is pressing down on her shoulder, is trying to keep her low, down below the worst of the heat and ash. “Can you—?”

The prompt is unnecessary. There’s already a humming of magic building between her hands; as close as they are, he can feel it even through the haze of smoke. A cold, damp chill settles in at the soles of his feet, cutting right through his boots—then a sweeping of ice from beneath them, curving upward and rising around them on either side like a thing alive, like a living bank of crystal, growing in a fast swoop. He cranes his neck to watch as the glittering surface bends in toward itself above them both, smoke blown out of the space as the walls knit themselves together into a roof, and then extend away from them, replacing dull hazy darkness with the shine of ice as it goes.

Sypha takes a deep breath beside him, now that the air is fresh and clean again, coughs lightly on the fumes she’d already inhaled. Doesn’t drop her hands from her casting sigil, doesn’t take a step forward; her focus is palpable.

A tunnel of ice. Adrian sets his palm on the surface, can feel how watery it is, just barely at the freezing point, fighting against the overwhelming heat in the air around it. He’s a little stunned—he’d had no idea Sypha had gotten so strong in recent months, so capable of summoning the elements in an environment this hostile to them.

“How long can you hold it?” he asks, urgent, because strong or not, no one can keep something like this up indefinitely, and there are still lives to save.

A bead of sweat runs down Sypha’s forehead, from the strain or from the oppressive heat they’ve only just escaped. Her brow furrows in concentration, eyes fierce but focused inward. “I can hold it,” she says, not truly answering the question. She takes another breath, steadies herself, then starts forward; the ice follows her, the tunnel growing longer and longer as she goes, a safe passage out of the inferno. This cannot be sustainable. “We will just need to find them quickly.”

Adrian glances down; she’s still got that stone in one hand, and what little light is illuminating the crystalline tunnel walls, Sypha’s eyes, that trail of sweat, is all coming from its elusive depths. It’s bathing everything in cool blue, unreal. She’s holding it slightly forward, and the way she’s walking it almost looks like she’s being tugged along by her hand.

“Sypha…” he starts, voice stronger, damage from the hot, ashy air already healing or healed. “What are you—” he starts, then reconsiders, scanning the room through the ice. Looking for motion, listening over the roar of the fire for the telltale thud of human heartbeats. “...do you know where they are?” he asks, instead.

“I don’t know,” she says, and she sounds as concerned as he feels. “But it’s pulling me. It wants me to go this way.” She changes direction, angling their tunnel toward a staircase that’s already disintegrating, but—but they will have solid ice underfoot the whole way.

And Adrian really does not like the idea of trusting Sypha’s still unidentified heirloom with the lives of the people trapped in here, but he can’t hear a thing over the roar of the fire, can’t see anything through the smoke, and when it comes down to it, he doesn’t have any better ideas.

“Lead on,” he coughs.

* *

The night creatures attacking the town tonight are all red-eyed monstrosities, not a single one of them alike or like anything Trevor’s seen before. One of them is winged, not like a devil but like an insect, like a dragonfly maybe, and its maw clicks with a hundred needle-like teeth. One of them is beaked like a bird but otherwise leathery and bare, its skin a grotesque bruised red-blue. One of them spits fucking _acid_ or something; Trevor’s trying hard not to be hit by it, so he can’t exactly expound on its chemical properties right now, fucking _thank you_.

Whoever it is that’s making these fuckers, they’re getting _creative_. 

All around them, he can see the signs of the townspeople having made a valiant effort, using all the tricks he’d taught them—scattered buckets, wet and icy cobbles, salt gritty under his boots where it grinds into the snow. Pikes and spears, snapped in half and dropped haphazardly in the square. Demon blood, near-black in the starlight, but human blood too. There are a few bodies. They tried.

They tried, and they put up a hell of a fight. If he hadn’t taught them, if he’d never come down here that sunny October afternoon and made their case and brute-forced a truce—if they hadn’t been willing to listen to him—

Trust is everything.

Trevor spins, directs some of that momentum into his arms and catches bruisey bird in the side of the skull with the weighted end of the chain whip, barely dodges another stream of maybe-acid in the aftermath of that blinding explosion—suddenly feels a back land against his own, hears the telltale squelch of a blade burying itself in something huge and meaty and unnatural—smiles grimly to himself. Belmonts versus the night. The way it’s supposed to be.

* *

In the end, they find all seven of the unlucky refugees; Adrian’s the one who dives into the smoke to retrieve each one of them, because unlike the humans they’re rescuing, he’s not going to take any damage from it that won’t fade. He’s the one that helps them stagger and crawl and collapse into the safety of Sypha’s icy enclosure. He’s the one that does what he can for their pain, for the smoke inhalation, gets them up and moving again so they can follow the tunnel back out into the cold, wintry night. 

He’s the one that sees the bodies. 

He almost thinks they’re simply passed out, when they find them—he’s given up on using his ears, and through the distortion of the ice, it’s hard to tell if they’re moving. These last two, the blacksmith and his daughter, are obviously the ones that the bauble in Sypha’s sweating, trembling hand had been pulling her to all along. 

They’re dead, though. They’re already dead. Too much smoke, too much heat up here in the highest part of the church.

A beam breaks above them, falls loose, lands across the roof of their tunnel with a splintering crack and keeps right on burning. Stonework falls next, the crumbling edifice of the church’s highest tower falling in under the strain of so much heat. Water drips down on them from the roof of the tunnel, on Adrian all covered in soot inside and out, on Sypha still lost in the depths of her focus.

It’s going to break. Sypha’s focus is failing, or her energy reserves are, and it’s going to collapse and all of it for two people who are _already dead_.

“Get them,” Sypha grits out, her teeth bared in a snarl of concentration.

“What?” Adrian coughs, panic starting to unravel his composure at the edges. “They’re _dead_, I won’t have you risk your life—”

“_Get them_,” she insists again, her voice suddenly echoey with all the endless depths of the abyss, all furious ghosts and grieving angels. When she looks up at him, a sharp jerk of her neck that he almost cannot track, the eyes that fix on his are hazy with a blue-white glow; her hair is standing up, waving in nonexistent wind. The stone in her hand is trembling, humming—and she is, in a word, _terrifying_. “That’s what it _wants_. _Now.”_

There’s an energy building in the air, like the pressure change before a storm, like the power of ancient creatures that is felt before it’s ever seen. Something is angry. It has demands. And it wants him to retrieve those bodies.

And, God help them both—he does.

* *

A rush of wind through his hair as Trevor ducks the slash just barely in time, falling back onto one arm, hand clutching for purchase on the freezing cobbles as he kicks up at the throw of the whip. His boot connects, correcting its course so that it winds around the lizard-like creature’s throat, pulling tight with a jerk and by the time he’s back on his feet, it’s just another explosion, another dark spot in the square where a night creature used to be.

They’re down to two. One here, one there, somewhere on the other side of the crowd of townsfolk, all of them with weapons drawn, doing their best to defend themselves.

Out of the corner of his eye, Leon takes a swipe at the beast nearest them with his goddamned _claws_, a brutal, debilitating attack aimed at its eyes and its vision—the tactician in Trevor immediately understands why the sword’s not at a good angle, sure, and you have to use the tools you’ve been given, whatever’s at hand, but for _fuck’s sake_—and there’s something in the shadowed planes of his face that screams _predator_ more viscerally than the creatures they’re fighting have ever done.

* *

“Sypha?” Adrian asks, voice trembling, settling his hands along the sides of her face and turning it up toward himself. They’re out of the church; the tunnel’s gone back to water and then to steam, and there was a bad moment near the end of their escape that’s left a pink, aching burn up one side of his torso, but he isn’t even feeling it. He’s too worried for petty things like pain. “Are you—”

But the contact seems to do something--the light in her eyes sparks out, the uncanny energy in the air dissipating. Her hair settles. The stone is suddenly just a stone, heavy only with gravity—and with the same clear depths as the tears suddenly brimming in her eyes.

“What happened?” she asks, words shaky with the certainty of grief. “I feel like something awful has happened, and I don’t…”

Adrian crushes her to his chest, focuses on the clean, human scent of her through the stench of the fire, thanks every deity he’s never believed in.

* *

Prey always knows when a predator is near.

And the thing is, Adrian? Trevor doesn’t have to worry about _Adrian_, in town. Adrian’s learned to talk and laugh and smile and _fight_ without showing his fangs or the true fire in his eyes; he’s learned to pass as human to these people’s skeptical gaze, even under duress.

And Trevor’s gotten complacent not having to worry about that, hasn’t he?

* *

“Was that _magic?”_

Adrian narrows his eyes over Syphas head. The crowd is small, tentative, mostly preoccupied with giving aid to the victims of the burning church, still coughing up soot and faces vaguely blue in the dim torchlight. The voice is shaky and nervous, not hostile so much as simply afraid; no wonder, given where magic has gotten them in the past. And they're on the verge of Sypha’s worst case scenario, that she would be caught using her full potential to save lives, to _help,_ and be damned for it.

Like every other supposed witch, burning brilliantly to the last. Like his mother.

She shudders against him, her strength spent, and he is not much better. He still gathers what presence he can, clutches her tighter—they will take her only over his own staked, bone-dry corpse—addresses the accusation head on: “Were you under the impression we defeated Dracula by hitting him on the head with a stick?”

It's a gamble, because it is an admission. It relies on these people understanding that all things can be used for both good and evil. It relies on the rapport they've built, on the loyalty they've engendered over months of standing against the night for them. 

It relies on the people they've chosen to defend being able to _learn, _being_ better _than their countrymen, better than the animals his father once accused all of humanity of being. 

He holds his breath, awaits their response.

* *

It happens like it’s in slow motion, like a lot of moments in fights seem to do. There’s a girl on the ground, a second away from having her face shredded, and then Leon runs the night creature clean through from behind, is turning to twist his blade free, sword and talons alike soaked in dark, demonic blood, and he’s all coiled up on adrenaline and violence, every movement uncanny with a feral, animal grace—and then the nearby torchlight falls onto his face, lighting it up in gold and red and shining white sharpness like the snarling visage of hell itself. 

_Ah, shit,_ Trevor thinks, a moment too late.

The night creature dies. The girl screams. There’s a panicked shout from one of the nearest townspeople, a pointing finger, and then all of a sudden things are happening too _quickly_—there’s a tide of movement, swords and knives and spears drawn and shaking and indecisive, being forced to split their targets, and a good chunk of them are coming towards him now—no, not towards Trevor. Towards _Leon._

The last of the night horde dies somewhere nearby, overwhelmed by numbers, a shriek caught in its rattling throat. In the relative silence that follows, Trevor feels more than sees Leon steady his stance, prepare to stand his ground.

Yeah, no. This isn’t good.

“Whoa, whoa,” Trevor says, heartbeat racing away ahead of his thoughts, his words, even his actions, as he inserts himself between Leon and the townspeople, arms spread wide in placation, chain whip still in hand. Because he may not know exactly what he's doing but what he does know is that if this collision happens, there will be blood shed, and he doesn't know whose and honestly doesn't know if it matters. This fragile, tenuous truce will not hold up to any act of violence, no matter how deserved. “Settle down, he's a—he’s on our side.”

“Are you _fucking serious_?” one of the men in the lead asks, with a heavy countryside accent and a heavier dose of vitriol. He’s armed with a crude sword, ugly but able to get the job done just fine, and Trevor thinks he's seen him around the market before, thinks he might be the town butcher? So he'll know his way around a blade, then. “I thought you were a _Belmont_. I shouldn't have to tell you that that's obviously a _fucking vampire_.”

“Yeah, he is,” Trevor says, even and metered, a cadence he's always found effective when it comes down to persuading with his words instead of his steel. He’s good at it, sure, but not yet a year out from Dracula’s bloody rampage and the final battle right in their backyard? This is going to be a hard sell. “A fucking vampire that just helped to defend your town.” Behind him, he can hear the quiet _shhk _of a sword being sheathed. Good. He lets the chains of his whip clink noisily against one another and against the cobblestones; let Trevor be the threat they’re focused on. “How about you save the pitchforks and torches routine for the monsters that actually deserve it, huh?”

And there's a part of his own mind, even, that's reeling at his words—a ghost of his twelve year old self, battling the night in clothes that barely fit him, that cannot believe he's standing here defending a vampire. That thinks maybe there really is something wrong in his head. That wonders if, after generations of passing down their monster hunting tools and techniques and instincts, those instincts have finally run thin enough that here he is, the last of that glorious house, coddling a beast in their name. 

But it's more complicated than that—obviously—and Trevor knows that isn't the inheritance he has to worry about, right now. And family is _fucking family_. 

“Trevor,” Leon says from behind him, a little tense, mostly composed. “You don't have to—”

“I know,” Trevor cuts him off, because he does know: Leon doesn't need his protection. He can fucking handle himself; he could rip through the entire crowd without breaking a sweat, if he had to. “But I don't want it to come to that.”

And oddly, it seems like it might not—the townsfolk have softened a little, their body language falling back to defensive, their expressions conflicted. It honestly seems too easy, in the moment, so of course: he pushes a little further. “If I'm saying he's not a danger,” Trevor says, in that same even tone no matter that he can feel the adrenaline burning in his throat, feel his heart pounding there, “you can trust that. Since I'm a Belmont, so I’m an _expert_.”

“I…guess?” The butcher sounds uncertain, but the sword in his hand droops a bit further—then lifts again, face hardening in resolve. “No, no. You said you would _protect_ _us_ from the monsters!”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Horseshit,” spits the next man over. “How can you protect us from them when you’re in league with them?”

“By preventing you from doing something _really fucking stupid_,” Trevor says, biting back the rest of the frustrated stream of invective that wants to come boiling out. He rubs a hand across his forehead, tacky with sweat--from the fight, from the panic earlier. He can’t lose his composure, here, and he knows it. “Look, how about this. We leave—right now. If he ever hurts anyone,” he says, glancing back _toward_ Leon but pointedly not making eye contact, “...and I mean, _actually _hurts someone, not just sick old Grandma got sicker so it’s time to find someone to blame—I’ll take care of the problem myself.”

“You’ll kill it?” the man asks, right on the edge of buying in, “And you’ll be responsible for whatever it does?” And Trevor didn’t want to have to do this, but he’s _so close_ to getting them out of this without anyone dying, without destroying everything they’ve worked for.

So: “If I have to,” he says, stern like he means it, like he would have even a snowball’s chance in hell of actually pulling it off. “Yes. But it won’t happen.”

The man just looks him straight in the eye for a long moment—then to the side, around him, at the vampire he’s guarding, or guarding them _from_. He must see something there; maybe it’s the same something that had Trevor trusting Leon far sooner than he should have been. Maybe it’s genuine integrity. Maybe it’s a fucking glamour. Either way, the man softens again, sword dropping toward his side.

He can see Sypha and Adrian out of the corner of his eye, off to the side, filthy with soot, drawn and still and quiet. Not daring to get any closer, for fear that they’ll break whatever spell he’s woven.

“Fine,” the man says, finally, eyes a little glassy. “You take care of it. And you keep that thing out of our town in the meantime.”

Trevor grits his teeth, can feel the rising anger like his blood put to boil. But he holds his tongue and that is, strangely enough, that—the confrontation unravels like a cut rope. The murmuring quiets. The crowd dissipates. Trevor takes a breath, lets it out. Turns back to Leon, who is giving him a very strange look, clearly also shocked at the ease with which Trevor handled the standoff but reluctant to say so aloud.

“That was… persuasive,” he says instead, with all the weight of a hefty euphemism.

“Yeah, I can be,” Trevor dismisses. “Not a total idiot when it comes to dealing with people, despite popular opinion. Look, though, I’m sorry I had to say all of that, I know you’re not— I just needed them to back the fuck down before it all went to hell.”

Leon looks like he wants to say something, like he’s _dying_ to say something, like it’s something profound and important. Instead, he turns and looks back out over the crowd. “Putting your own reputation on the line—it’s a good thing that I’m not planning on any rampages.”

Trevor laughs, though it isn’t funny. “Yeah, I figured as much.”

“Trevor,” comes a hoarse voice from the side then, barely recognizable but for its obvious accent—and suddenly, he is not thinking about any of these stupid town politics anymore. Sypha. He turns and throws his arms around her, sweeping her off her feet in a crushing hug.

“Careful,” she coughs, then coughs again, the sound jagged with heat and pain. Her arms around his back feel tentative, almost weak. She feels alarmingly fragile.

“Are you all right?” he asks, fear suddenly rising up the back of his throat. He sets his hands on her face, rubs at the soot on her cheeks with both thumbs, clears out the space below her eyes. She looks exhausted, completely drained, and he has long known that fire doesn’t always take its price immediately, that many have been the unfortunates who survive a blaze only to suffocate in their own lungs a day later. 

That might have been his fate, once, if he’d been—

“I am… fine,” she says, though it sounds painful and also very much like a lie. Her eyes look positively haunted. She may be _physically_ fine, but something happened while they were separated, and…

She leans into him then, into the circle of his arms, all the remaining strength going out of her. 

“Oh, good, Sypha,” comes Adrian’s likewise strained voice, from off to the side. He slumps up to them with a weariness that belies his usual resilience. “You found a nice dense wall to lean on—I think I’ll join you.”

“Don’t you dare,” Trevor warns, half laughing, arms too full of exhausted Speaker to do anything about it. “I’m not _that_ sturdy.”

“I think,” Adrian says, leaning into his side, head on Trevor’s shoulder and hands pillowed beneath his painfully bony chin, “that you are selling yourself short.” 

“I _am_ shorter than you.” Trevor feels the world lurch worryingly, isn’t sure if it’s the protracted weariness of his bloodloss or the remnants of his panic but whatever it is, it isn’t great. The smell of fire on them both is overwhelming; it makes something ugly and scared bloom out of control in his gut. He swallows tightly against it. “Though who the fuck isn’t. Get your ass off me.”

Sypha giggles, a little giddy. “That isn’t what you said the other ni—”

“Just to clarify,” Trevor interrupts, throwing one arm around Adrian’s shoulders, pulling them both in a little more tightly. His voice feels strange, feels like it’s barely there. “Neither of you is _actually_ about to drop dead on me, right?”

Silence.

“I’m sorry,” Sypha says, pulling back a bit, taking her weight off of him. “You—this really upset you. I should have realized.”

_run run run run oh god run he’s—_

“I’m fine,” he says, pressing on his eyes until he sees brilliant flaming sparks, because two can play at that game.

“You’re not.”

“You’re definitely not,” Adrian says, burrowing his face into Trevor’s neck in a way that makes heat thrill through him, but all Adrian does is inhale there against the bandages, deep and slow and sad. “I can still smell the panic on you.”

_flame licking the coal-black sky brilliant stars brilliant snow cold cold cold_

“What _was_ that?” Sypha asks, leaning the side of her face against his chest, where he can feel his own heart thudding wildly. “Earlier. You were somewhere else.”

“I wasn’t,” he says, digging in his heels. He isn’t even sure where Leon is at this point; bastard could be off having the aforementioned rampage and Trevor wouldn’t even know, so focused is he on diverting this conversation off its course. “I’m just still run down—it was nothing—”

“As you would say,” she cuts him off, “that is bullshit.”

Adrian leans away now too, and suddenly Trevor’s the one who needs support. He presses his eyes closed, resists groping blindly with a hand for something to hold onto.

_burning stone and wood and linen and hair and flesh and the sound of animals screaming but it’s not all animals it’s_

“You were some_when_ else, weren’t you?” Adrian asks, quiet, close. “Another fire.”

_and no one is going to be okay and things will never be okay_

Trevor digs his thumbs into his temples. “Fuck, yes, okay? Yes,” he mutters, because fuck it, they’re not giving up and they’re not _going_ _to_ give up, fuck him for saddling himself with the two stubbornest assholes in the world. “Satisfied?”

“No,” Sypha says, and when he cracks his eyes to look down at her, her gaze is sharp and demanding, and as full of love as ever, but the soot and her drawn pallor and her sheer _intensity _make her face look like a skull, like a death’s head beetle, like something lost and gone.

“You need to talk about it,” the skull says, and it rings like a sentence of death. “You need to tell us.”

“I think it’s time,” Adrian whispers.

“I’m _fine_,” Trevor insists, though it sounds weaker than he’d like. “I’m all right. Childhood tragedy, blah blah, it’s ancient history, right? Nothing to talk about.”

“You were clearly not all right, back there,” Leon cuts in, and fuck, Trevor should have guessed he’d _actually _been listening, out on the edges, ready to jump in when Trevor’s argument was at its weakest. He would almost have preferred the rampage. “I know I’m overstepping, but I think you owe them the chance to help you. You owe me the truth of what happened that night. And you owe it to yourself to not bear it alone.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck this fire and fuck the night creatures that started it and fuck Leon ‘doesn’t know how to stay dead’ Belmont, Leon ‘I told you my entire tragic awful story so now you can’t refuse to tell yours without feeling like an utter shit’ Belmont, because of course he’s _fucking right._

“God, shit,” Trevor says, rubbing a hand down his face, masking his mouth with it before he can say anything worse. He tilts his head back, gives the stars a moment to ground him, with their cool, unwavering stability. Nothing up there dies and goes away. Nothing up there _burns_.

Sypha coughs again, a harsh ashy little bark of lungs too full of soot. Adrian blearily wipes the stuff from his eyes. _They’re okay_, he reminds himself. _A bath and some fresh air, that’s all they need._

_Someday, they won’t be okay. No matter how hard you try to die before them, you are always left behind, will always be left behind. And then it will be too late._

“Fine,” he says finally, abruptly, reaching to secure the Morning Star to his belt, shoving both his hands back through his hair. “Fine. Can it wait until we’re somewhere the _entire town_ can’t overhear?”

Sypha nods, and Adrian lays a hand on his back, below the mantle, where he can really feel it through the threadbare linen of his tunic. It occurs to him that he lost his cloak somewhere, that he is very, very cold, now that the fire’s out and all the adrenaline is deserting him.

They find it by the town gate, where the horses are tied. Sypha wraps it around his shoulders wordlessly and they walk the animals back to the castle on foot, two humans and two immortals and three very tired horses, all of their footfalls as quiet in the damp, dead grass as dusk snow. 

They take their time. Trevor is in no hurry.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, apologies for the wait. Let's just assume going forward that these are going to take longer than they used to, because a) the world is a ball of stress right now and b) i'm in my residency now which, ever seen Scrubs? It's like that, but without the glittery unicorns. Free time is a luxury I don't often have.
> 
> Anyway! Notes!  
1) Enjoy nerds being nerds. This scene was originally much longer but it was too info-dumpy and gave too much away; sorry to deprive you of prime dorky syphacard content.  
2) Yeah uh. Those sure are some things that happened. c.c;  
3) Trevor really does have an impressive track record when it comes to talking people into things, doesn't he?  
4) A long awaited story/explanation is finally on its way, and Trevor is finally on his way to getting his head out of his ass about it and letting his family HELP HIM.

**Author's Note:**

> The Speakers are lovely! But even their way of doing things has its issues to deal with, and some are pretty un-fun. 
> 
> Notes:  
1\. The ruins at Enisala are real. Even in the late 1400s, they'd already been abandoned long enough that no one knew who built them. AFAIK, they're still standing.  
2\. The book Kiri is referring to is Cerrahiyyetü'l Haniyye (Imperial Surgery) by Serefeddin Sabuncuoğlu, written in 1465. That doesn't actually matter, I'm just a fucking nerd.  
3\. 'Kismet' wasn't used in English until the 1800s, but it has Arabic roots and these folks aren't speaking English anyway, so fuck it.  
4\. LILY IS THE BEST I LOVE HER SO MUCH HERE HAVE A DRAWING OF HER: [LILY](https://i.imgur.com/fgPC3QR.jpg)  
5\. If you're wondering how Trevor and Alucard are doing, no worries, we'll be bopping back to the castle in the next chapter!


End file.
